In recent few weeks, I’ve read and listened to a flurry of angry reactions to the current state of Nigerian football, exemplified by the showing of Enyimba FC of Aba against Wydad Casablanca of Morocco in the new money-spinning African competition – the African Football League.
It beats me how many fellows are yet to conclude that our football is in a nadir, which is a consequence of many years of scratching of the issues on the surface. I have for long seen an ominous KARMA dangling over Nigerian football.
There’s no way the cracks could be papered, our football in administration, in management and on the field has been in an INTENSIVE CARE waiting to die.
Enyimba is just an example that represents our fall in clubside football. The national teams are horrendous.
If Nigeria was rated highly by FIFA, after the 1994 World Cup, and in almost 30 years after, is rated number 40, it goes that the margin has been stupendously wasteful.
If in 1976 and 1977, IICC shooting stars of Ibadan and Enugu Rangers won the African Winners Cup, and in 1990 BCC Lions of Gboko won the same Cup, while Enyimba won the prestigious Champions League in 2003 and 2004, it again implies 19 years have shown no remarkable trajectory in our clubside football dynamics.
The result is that we have failed to produce and sustain another set of the likes of Stephen Keshi, Etim Esin, Rashidi Yekini, Peter Rufai, Muda Lawal and many more who signposted our football in the 80s and the 90s.
I often read and hear the argument that state governments have no business in running clubsides. I also ask back, who ran IICC and Rangers in the 70s? Who ran Enyimba in their dizzying periods ?
Business is business, and could be consummate in conceptualisation and implementation with the right people, knowledge and skill-set, whether at public or at private levels. What is missing in Nigeria’s current football environment is the cutting edge ECOSYSTEM in which the business of the game thrives with a competitive economically rewarding system for both state and private investors in the game.
This is the panacea for development and growth of truly genuine football talents and culture that will radiate national life and determine the strength of our clubsides and national teams.
The KARMA is here. Facing it headlong with all the sacrifices and investments that come with it is the way out of the tunnel.
BIODUN ALABI
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