It’s the question that keeps many Nigerians awake at night.
How do we professionalise the administration and
management of football in Nigeria? It’s the challenge that has been the
bane of our football these many years, through foreign and local
coaches, knowledgeable and ignorant sports administrators, democratic
and military governments. We have remained almost at the same spot,
dealing with the same issues, in the same clichéd vicious cycle.
Indeed, to underline the problem, we have many times even gone rebounding back to wooing old coaches we had earlier condemned.
The argument can be made that it is difficult to
isolate football administration from the leadership and administrative
problems that plague Nigeria. However, true as that would be, it would
be missing a crucial distinction: that football is the one pitch where
all Nigerians have the same goal. We want to win, we want things done
properly, and neither ethnic background, religious affiliation nor any
of our other famous problems matter much.
So are we on track with the seeming alignment of
forces that gave the $1.5 million coach from Sweden the job of
‘saving’? Hardly.
Let’s take the measure of this man and the task
ahead of him for instance. He has been given a target of at least a
semi-final finish for the Super Eagles in South Africa. Like any coach
worthy of his name, he has confidently declared this target achievable.
“You have good individual skills in Nigeria,” Lars
Lagerback told this paper last week. “So if we can get that together
with the players, I think we have a fairly good chance to go far in the
World Cup.” That sounds like the very first problem, and sets off an
alarm bell: it reveals a misunderstanding of Nigerian football and its
administrative issues.
Because, no matter how skilled Mr. Lagerback is,
the enormous problem facing Nigerian football is not something that can
be wished away with a magic hand, nay not even a highly recommended
magic hand that has qualified his national team for the World Cup
twice. Nigeria has neither lacked for great players nor has it been in
short supply of “good individual skills”, and so if the aforementioned
are the basic issues Mr. Lagerback has identified, then Nigerians who
have framed him as our bastion of hope need to begin to scale down
their expectations.
In any case, it is important to note that the
Swede only has a five-month contract, with a brief to coach Nigeria in
the World Cup. For this coach therefore, there is no interest in
determining any long-term strategy for moving the sport forwards.
Indeed, as has been our experience, the coaches will come and go, but
the problems will remain.
Neither “good individual players” nor excellent
coaches are going to solve the kind of problem that arose when English
Coach Glenn Hoddle revealed that our football administrators had asked
him to increase his asking price by more than hundred percent so that
there would be enough for corrupt officials to take a bite of. That is
a deeper, systemic problem.
Our football has been so politicised and corrupted
that it has become both a blood sport, with many officials who would
rather kill the sport than allow anyone on their turf; and a private
enterprise, in which case narrow interests ensure that the goal post
continues to be shifted until it suits them.
That is why we have a multiplicity of groups that
were committed to helping us forge a formidable World Cup challenge –
the Presidential Task Force on Super Eagles Qualification for the World
Cup, the Nigerian Football Federation, the National Sports Council, and
on top of all this the ministry of sports – and yet we barely limped to
South Africa 2010.
Mr. Lagerback will find these challenges daunting,
just like those before him. The challenges include officials who do not
have the required skill , players without the necessary commitment,
funds that continue to be mismanaged, a lack of the facilities or
requirements including training and motivation needed to have any kind
of sustainable progress, and a media that is shamefully complicit more
often than not. Even if he does manage to reach the semi-final
benchmark that has been set for him, he will be able to restore
confidence in our football, but as always it will only be a pyrrhic
victory.
Entrenched as the problems of our football are,
however, they really do not require the services of rocket scientists
to solve. A starting point is employing people who understand that the
sport has to be run professionally, with clearly set targets, must be
disciplined, focused and all the benchmarks required to meet those
targets promptly and correctly provided.
Indeed, speaking about his World Cup strategy,
Nigeria’s national team coach seems to have figured this out: “A really
good striker is always at the right place,” he said. “In a way, that is
the most important thing – if you have good techniques, and you have
high balls coming at you and you can finish with your first touch…
Read the game; be on the right spot at the right time, but also you
want very good technique.” Now, replace “striker” with “football
management” and Mr.
Lagerback is actually answering that eternal question about how to administer Nigerian football properly.
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