The new coach for Super Eagles

By Ayodele Okunfolami

After a draw and a loss, making the Super Eagles’ chances of qualifying for the next World Cup dicey, Finidi George resigned his position as coach of the Senior National Team. Finidi was there for less than two months. Now Nigeria is again combing for whom to manage the team.

In a soccer crazy nation like Nigeria, everybody is interested in the performance of the national team. We all saw how Nigerians were united behind the team during the African Cup of Nations. That’s what football success means to Nigerians and whoever manages the national team is of concern.

There is usually a foreigner-indigenous divide on whom to manage the team. Let me go straight to where I belong: I believe that Nigerian football has since come of age and no outsider should coach the team again. I will give my reasons why I do not believe in foreign coaches and hopefully explain what I mean by foreigner and indigenous.

To begin with, it is colonial mentality that everything foreign is better. It is the same attitude we bring to call ups to the national team in which players in the local league are never given a chance to be selected. How does one explain why the highest goal scorer of the NPFL doesn’t get an invite or that we have a goalkeeping problem and yet none of the 20 goalkeepers that feature weekly gets a mention? We have even gone further the drain by not only picking foreign-based ahead of the local to giving foreign-born greater advantage in wearing the Nigerian jersey.

Despite no country ever winning the World Cup with a foreign coach, that the last three AFCONs were won by indigenous coaches or that all the African teams that went to Qatar were led by indigenous coaches, those in the foreign coach divide will still sound louder than a vuvuzela in a blender in favour of a white man leading the Eagles. Even if a Nigerian someday wins the World Cup, they will attribute it to commitment of the players not competence of the coach.

Another reason some people have completely written off local coaches is the allegations that indigenous coaches don’t have the clout to earn the respect of the professional players.

So you can imagine how pissed I was when there were hushes of hiring a foreign technical adviser Finidi would have been answerable to had he not resigned. On paper, it sounds as if they want to salvage the tumultuous qualification process but it is usually more about some novices who found themselves in football administration wanting to make optimal financial gain from that position. Truth is that the ultimate search for foreign gaffers for the national team is a racket. A white manager is always in the conversation from our administrators because it is always an opportunity to door knock Europe for phantom interviews with supposedly celebrated coaches only to return with an unknown candidate with a well-padded CV.

And this is the other reason I do not support our choices of foreign coaches. They never give us the Guardiolas, Ancelottis, Klopps, or Mourinhos of this world, they come with one whose back story is only known by the NFF. Why ignore top Nigerians for lowly ranked Europeans?

If not inferiority complex, why do we call him a technical adviser when he is white but coach when he is Nigerian? By the way, besides Nigeria, where else is “technical adviser” used? We use the term as if the Nigerian is a mere placeholder for an overestimated expatriate.

Football, like every other sport is a result industry where one is judged mainly by performance. However, there is more to the scoreboard. We often do not give indigenous coaches the required tools and environment. Contracts are not signed with them and if done, they are owed the meagre salaries promised. Why won’t they take bribes to survive? How won’t the players disrespect them when the administrators that employed them disregard them?

The indigenous coach is always under pressure despite taking the job in perilous times like we find ourselves now. A small hump on the round and we scapegoat him for a sack. Compared to his overhyped foreign counterpart that is treated like royalty and given all the perks needed for work including time that the local coach never has. That is why citing the successes of Clemens Westerhof or Gernot Rohr as yardsticks for foreign managers is unfair. I always say, “Give a Nigerian time; he would win the World Cup.” What did Westerhof achieve in six years that Stephen Keshi didn’t surpass in two years? Enough said.

So now that Finidi is gone, how should the NFF go about the hunt for a coach for the national team? Unfortunately, it is the familiar simplistic wururu-to-the-answer hiring to fulfil tournament obligations. And there lies the problem. It is this myopic tournament-centric football that has made Nigeria not to benefit the most from the sport. We approach it like a school set up primarily to pass exams instead of educating the pupils.

Because our football is architected in terms of tournaments, we appoint coaches only to qualify and attempt to win competitions. This implies coverage, funding and other forms of marketing for players, teams and the sport only comes up during tournaments. This puts pressure on the coaches to select (over-aged) players only for winning no matter how iniquitous and languid he goes about it.

So, instead of looking at the next AFCON or World Cup in choosing a coach, NFF should look at creating a football industry that will self-procreate coaches and players after its kind. They should look more intently at viable football nations that have taken World Cups and topping FIFA rankings for granted. These nations do so not just with indigenous coaches but with indigenous football.

Indigenous football is simply having you own football style, football culture, football language and football DNA. The reason a foreigner will not even be considered to manage the Dutch national team, for instance, is not for patriotism, national policy or economic expediency but because the then manager of Ajax, Rinus Michels, had in the 1970s developed what we know as Total Football that is peculiar to the Netherlands. This is what Pep Guardiola built on when he took lessons from handball and other ball sports to evolve what that commentator that couldn’t keep pace with Barcelona’s endless passing called tiki-taka. Today, Spanish teams, men and women of all ages, will pass their adversaries dizzy unto submission. While the Italians are evolving from their ruthless defensive catenaccio to a more positive and possession football, European influence has made Brazil to change the rhythms of their Samba to rhyme with present realities.

These nations are so enshrined in their respective football cultures that they hardly pick players outside their individual leagues to make up their national teams. The Italian team for instance is made up of over 90% of players from the Serie A. Despite Brazil sourcing her players from Europe, their formative years can be traced to local teams in Brazil who left home primarily for money. It is these individualities that make it difficult for these nations to contemplate foreigners.

Nigerian music can be identified globally, likewise Nollywood without “technical advisers”. Our football has come of age.

Getting our own Nigerian football accent is beyond the NFF. Government must completely hands off professional football and other elite sports completely for the private sector. It is government’s hold on football that this pay-as-you-go system makes us measure football only by trophies won and appearances in international events. Governors fund state-run clubs so that it can appear in continental competitions not for the employments football or making an industry out of the game.

Secondly, government should prioritise sports development. I would propose that sport academies be run and funded like our formal schools, accredited and placed under a department in the Ministry of Education. Because the templates for Total Football and Tiki Taka were developed and formalised not in the national team but in the grassroots academies of Ajax and La Masia. This is where the science of our football can be crafted based on our vision, resources and personnel into curriculums that would be handed over to pedagogues to impact on our football nurseries. The multiplier effect is how we get our own football identity and steeze. It is this ecosystem that produces players and coaches for our various national teams. So we don’t just play to win, but like Italy, Brazil and co, we also propagate our brand of soccer.