Greetings, all and sundry.
Before most of us fell in love with Enyimba, we probably fell in love with football first. The tricks, the flicks, the long passes that look programmed to arrive exactly where they are supposed to, the impossible saves and, of course, the goals. Enyimba simply gave many of us somewhere to channel all that affection, and if we did not care this much about the People’s Elephant, this website probably would not exist. Much of the criticism we direct at Enyimba, the NPFL or Nigerian football generally comes from knowing what these institutions can be and being frustrated by how often those entrusted with them appear comfortable with far less.
Stephen King once observed that some of the most convincing lies are the ones we tell ourselves, and Nigerian football appears to have perfected that art. On Monday, the Nigeria Football Federation effectively brought an end to Justin Madugu’s time with the Super Falcons technical crew. The language may have been softer than the action, but whether someone is “asked to step down” or shown the door with slightly nicer grammar, the result is largely the same.
What interested me even more was the decision to establish another fact-finding committee. There is something almost uniquely Nigerian about performing poorly for years and then gathering six people around a table to investigate why things are not working. Sometimes the answer may already be sitting in the room. For years, Nigerian football has struggled with the transition between youth football and the senior national teams, yet we continue to act surprised whenever the consequences eventually reach the top.
We love talking about the Golden Eaglets because five U17 World Cup titles look beautiful on a graphic, but the pathway that should take talented youngsters from that level through the Flying Eagles, the Olympic team and eventually the Super Eagles has never been consistently protected. Development is not winning a youth tournament and scattering afterwards. A proper football structure should identify talent, nurture it, expose it to quality competition and create a clear route towards the senior level.
Instead, we often appear more comfortable waiting for European academies and foreign football systems to finish developing players before discovering that they are eligible to represent Nigeria. There is nothing wrong with inviting foreign-developed players if they improve the national team, but that cannot become a substitute for doing the difficult work ourselves. You cannot neglect the foundation of a house for years and then become surprised when cracks begin appearing upstairs.
Our youth teams frequently prepare under less-than-ideal conditions, international exposure can be inconsistent, and the structures that once made school and grassroots football important feeders into the national setup have weakened considerably. Yet whenever the senior teams stumble, the response is often another committee, another meeting and another document containing words like “strategic,” “technical” and “development.” At some point, somebody has to ask what happened to the last strategy.
The interesting question about the latest committee is simple: what happens if it concludes that the biggest problem with Nigerian football is poor administration? Will the administrators accept those findings and act on them, or will the recommendations quietly disappear until the next crisis produces another committee?
Fyodor Dostoevsky warned about the danger of repeatedly lying to oneself until the lie becomes difficult to distinguish from reality, and that warning fits Nigerian football almost too comfortably. We regularly measure football development by how many young Nigerians manage to secure contracts abroad. It does not always matter where they go; once the player has left the country for a foreign league, somebody will present it as evidence that grassroots football is flourishing.
But exporting footballers is not automatically the same thing as developing football. If our domestic system were genuinely thriving, the evidence should also be visible at home through better academies, improved coaching, stronger youth competitions, modern training facilities, healthier clubs, proper scouting systems and players who can remain in the NPFL for a few seasons without feeling as though their careers are passing them by.
Our relationship with club football reveals another contradiction. Nigerian supporters spend serious money on data subscriptions to watch European football, buy foreign club jerseys, argue about transfer budgets belonging to billionaires they have never met and place bets on teams thousands of kilometres away. Yet ask some of the same people to pay a modest fee to watch the club representing their own city and suddenly football becomes a constitutional right that must be provided free of charge.
We cannot demand professional football while treating the product as something nobody should have to pay for. Clubs need revenue, supporters need a product worth paying for, and administrators need to create conditions where both can happen. Instead, we often complain about weak commercial structures while simultaneously refusing to support the small revenue streams that could help those structures grow.
Perhaps no word has suffered more abuse in Nigerian football than “development.” Politicians develop football, administrators develop football, associations develop football and committees develop football. Sometimes you would think the country has developed enough football to export some to neighbouring countries. Yet stadium projects drag on for years, facilities deteriorate after commissioning, national teams struggle for permanent high-quality training bases, and school competitions that once helped discover and connect young talent have lost much of their national importance.
This is why I sometimes wonder whether Nigerians truly love football development or simply love the numbers and excitement surrounding football. We love hearing that a Nigerian player has been sold for €20 million, discussing Premier League salaries, transfer fees, sponsorship figures and prize money. But real football development is much less glamorous. It means maintaining pitches when nobody is watching, training coaches properly, organising youth competitions year after year, paying players when they are supposed to be paid and keeping facilities functional long after politicians have cut ribbons and photographers have gone home.
That part requires patience, discipline and consistency, and perhaps that is where our biggest problem lies. There is a popular saying on Nigerian social media that no matter how ridiculous something becomes, someone will eventually appear to defend it. You see this whenever criticism is directed at football administrators, because somebody quickly reminds you that the problems existed before the current people arrived.
Fair enough, but nobody was forced into office. If you willingly accept responsibility for managing Nigerian football, you also accept responsibility for improving whatever you inherited. “We met it like this” may explain the starting point, but it cannot remain the excuse forever.
The solution does not require a saint to descend from heaven and become NFF president. A good place to start is something painfully ordinary: maintenance culture. When a structure already exists, improve it. When a competition works, strengthen it. When a stadium is built, maintain it. When a youth programme produces talent, fund it properly instead of abandoning it for the next shiny initiative. When a system fails, correct it rather than simply renaming it and launching another one.
Nigeria has a habit of becoming excited about new projects while existing ones slowly decay behind us. We enjoy commissioning things much more than maintaining them, but today’s shiny new project eventually becomes tomorrow’s abandoned structure if the culture around it does not change. Football nations are not built through endless launches; they are built through systems that survive the people who created them.
That is what Nigerian football desperately needs: an identity and a culture that values continuity, accountability and maintenance just as much as announcements and ambition. The countries moving ahead of us have understood a truth we keep trying to negotiate with, which is that football does not begin with the Super Eagles or Super Falcons.
It begins long before the national anthem plays in a packed stadium. It begins with the child playing organised football at school, the properly trained youth coach, the academy with a functioning pitch, the U17 player with a clear route towards the U20s, the domestic club capable of developing and retaining talent, and the competition that still exists next year because somebody bothered to maintain what was built this year.
We can continue deceiving ourselves and forming committees every time another failure becomes too obvious to ignore, or we can finally accept the uncomfortable truth and start fixing the foundation. No matter how beautiful the roof looks, a house built on a neglected foundation will eventually remind everyone what it is standing on.
