Football Nigeria -- Eagles Etcetera

“I don’t have a bench to work right now. In the past one year, Nigeria has used 62 players in our 10 or 11 matches .I don’t have those I can say these are the players to form the core of my team. If I have say six of such players, I can then say these are the core of my team and start to build on it.”                          --- Coach Sunday Oliseh. Fact checking the statement above became necessary as it stuck out. To be sure, Oliseh was not criticizing previous coaches. He was just stating what he believed was fact and it was an answer to a question about who Nigeria’s core players are. However, since then some have questioned why a Nigerian coach should have used 62 players in a single year! We decided to check the facts on this. Below are the results. 1       FACT: Nigeria did in fact use over 60 players in a single year. That is a fact. This occurred in 2014 under Stephen Keshi. ...

After Emmanuel Emenike burst of goals during the 2013 Nations Cup, many began to put him on a pedestal with some of Nigeria's top strikers in recent time. But do the statistics confirm this? How about a similar case for Ikechukwu Uche and for Obafemi Martins? What is not in dispute is that Rashidi Yekini and Thompson Usiyen are the top two strikers ever produced by Nigeria's national team. Though one must acknowledge that Elkanah Onyeali may well have a place in any dispute that may exist about the place of both Yekini and Usiyen in history. Though, Onyeali's place in history may be dimmed since his goal scoring achievements came during Nigeria's lean years and four of his goals arrived in a rather meaningless game against Dahomey (now Benin Republic) on November 28, 1959. If we accept the above position, then what seems arguable is who among Nigeria's strikers, post-Yekini era, could stake the claim for being Nigeria's best. Is it Julius Aghahowa? Yakubu A...

Reading recently that Nigeria's new national team coach, Sunday Oliseh, will be primarily based in Europe came as a shock to me for several reasons. Conventionally, the primary residence of Nigeria's national team coach has always  been controversial, particularly when the appointee is someone without Nigerian citizenship. In fact, there has always been an insistence that the coach maintain primary residence in Nigeria and often a long-term accommodation for the coach becomes part of the contract. Often, a Nigerian-born appointee (such as Oliseh) is expected to reside in Nigeria and thus the issue is mute. Thus, it was a surprise to read that Oliseh will be resident in Europe. Of course, one could argue that most of Nigeria's internationals reside in Europe and, thus, it makes little sense for the national team coach to be based in Nigeria. That, of course, is a perfectly reasonable argument but only sustainable if Oliseh's charge was merely to coach the Nigerian nati...

The story below is directly from Nigerian Football Federation's (NFF) website and, thus, must be considered accurate. You can find the story by clicking on NFF . Reading the story leads me to the following interpretations: 1.      Sunday Oliseh’s job is far more reaching than had been the case with previous national team coaches. He will not only coach the A squad but will oversee Nigeria’s football by beginning the process of codifying it and outlining its culture. Essentially, he takes over a task that was supposedly Shuaibu Amodu’s. 2.      Pinnick did get his wish for a foreign technical imprint on Nigeria’s football.   In fact, not only did Pinnick get what many thought he was focused on but he got more! The designated Foreign Assistant is only such by name. In essence, that Assistant will have (by all intents and purposes) far reaching influence. He will oversee the entire youth development. My sense is that because those youth...

In spite of widespread knowledge of human behavior and an understanding of general systems, there remains a willingness to explain football results solely by the simplistic ideas that: "all results derive from coaching." This is misleading and retrogressive. It reeks of, perhaps, lazy analysis or simply an inability to deal with complexities and, thus, a willingness to chase the "simple route." In this brief piece, I do not focus on providing statistics to expose the fallacy of "all results derive from coaching." Instead, I assume that what we all understand in the statement "football is not mathematics" should open the window to the universal truth that football results expectedly feature "up and downs" and unpredictabilities, which are the crux of game's excitement. No coach has been able to buck that trend nor will there be a coach to do so. At best, a 'good' coach will provide a certain probability o...

In this piece I take a look at data on set-peice goals scored by Nigeria in two competitions -- the Cup of African Nations (CAN) and the World Cup. We use the complete World Cup statistics for Nigeria and in the CAN we select the last five tournaments that Nigeria was a participant. The data show remarkable difference between the two competitions. Nigeria has done much better in the percentage of goals scored via set-piece and the percentage conceded via set-piece in the CAN compared to the World Cup. An obvious argument here is that Nigeria faces much better competition in the World Cup and this is demonstrated in the records of games played in the two competitions. The World Cup Nigeria's record of set-piece goals is poor. Nigeria has scored just 20% of its World Cup goals from a set-piece compared to conceding more than half of goals scored by opponents from set-piece. In essence, Nigeria has only conceded 12 goals from open play in the World Cup. This means less than a goa...

One of the goals of the Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA) is to develop youth football and improve the game at the senior national team level. Of course, many could argue that this has been achieved already with faster and better tactical and technical play at the most senior level. However, one of the questions is whether there is a correlation between success at the lower youth level and success at the older levels. In essence, if a country performs well at a youth level, does that performance predict success at the higher level in a few years? In this piece, we explore that question. The result here is exploratory and must be interpreted with extreme caution as it does not meet with strict requirements of scientific study. For instance, we have not looked at team rosters in order to answer the question nor have we controlled for effects of extraneous variables. Instead, we simply compared data on teams that reached the semi-final stages (Top Four) of U17,...