DISCIPLINARY RECORDS: Nigeria's National Team and Players

This is another story line providing insight to the often muted records of the Nigerian national team. Recently, Nigeria finished two critical games at the African Nations Championship (CHAN) with a man less than the opponent due to disqualifications. Thus, these insights are designed to make accessible the unvoiced, ignored, and often erased records that affect Nigeria's games. This disciplinary record of the Nigerian national team and its players is gleaned from match records. We focus attention on assessed cautions and disqualifications from international games since 1949.

Of course, as you may have guessed, this is drawn from a huge number of games played by the national team and, thus, assessed record of cautions and disqualifications are plentiful.  To simplify matters, I focus solely on the top incidents as defined by the volume of incidents per game in case of the team and volume per career in case of individual players. Further, cautions are separated from disqualifications at both individual and team levels, except in the case of match specific disqualifications where additional incidences of cautions are used to rank the severity of the disciplinary issue. Below is data and discussion.

Team Data

For disqualifications, severity is calculated by volume of disqualification as well as accompanying cautions in particular games. Based on this, the most severe cases are two games, both played away from home, that led to two disqualifications and one caution each. In essence, Nigeria finished both games playing with nine men. The most recent of those is in an AFCON semi-final game in 2002 when Nigeria lost 1-2 to Senegal after extra time. The other is a 1979 game in Freetown when Nigeria tied 0-0 with Sierra Leone. Other identified games can be found on Table 1 below.

On cautions, the game that has the record is five cautions issued in an international friendly against Cape Verde in Algarve, Portugal in 2013. No other Nigerian team has received that many cautions in a single game. However, there are numerous other games where three or four cautions were issued to the team. For details see Table 2 below.

Individual Data

Disqualifications received by a player during his playing career for Nigeria is often one caution over the career length. However, some players have received more than one disqualification including former left back Ifeanyi Udeze who's disciplinary record is infamous (see Gazing At Onazi's. . .). Udeze, nevertheless, does not lead among players with disqualifications because the calculation is based on propensity for disqualifications per game during a career span. Based on that calculation, Dahiru Sadi, with less career games, leads the pack. See Table 3 and Figure 1 for details.

The last time, I did a calculation based on individual cautions received over career span, Ogenyi Onazi and Ifeanyi Udeze led the pack. However, since then, Onazi has improved his record. Though he still appears in the Top 10, he has moved down the infamous ladder. Instead, the likes of Ifeanyi Ifeanyi, John Ogu, and Orji Kalu Okogbue have taken over with record of accumulation of match cautions calculated on propensity to generate such cautions (see Table 3 and Figure 2).