Football Nigeria -- Eagles Etcetera

Here we take a look at leadership of the Nigerian national team in the hope of discovering a few things. We selected just a few of the captains from Christian Chukwu to Vincent Enyeama. It is important to note that we did not select every captain in between those periods. For instance, we did not include Uche Okechukwu or Augustine Okocha in our sample. We compared only six captains - Chukwu, Keshi, Oliseh, Kanu, Yobo, and Enyeama - on certain datasets along two major classifications of 'all games' and 'competitive games.' We looked at number of games played, percentage of those games captained, percentage started, efficiency in games captained, and minutes played. Efficiency is calculated by noting percentage of all possible points obtained in the game captained. Each of those factors were compared in the two categories of 'all games' and 'competitive games.' One of the surprises we found is that Chukwu started all games that he had played for Niger...

Most Nigerian national team coaches begin their tenure by speaking on the need to rebuild the national team and they speak glowingly about the abundance of Nigerian talent. One way of rebuilding a team is debuting new talent and determining those good enough to be part of strong team going forward. However, while it appears clear that there are several talented Nigerian players available for selection into the national team, some coaches often rely on established players. Our report here is not on  reliance on established players but on discovery of new talent. Thus, what we do in this report is to compare eight  coaches –Shuaibu Amodu,  Johaness Bonfrere, Christian Chukwu, Augustine Eguavoen, Stephen Keshi, Adegboye Onigbinde, Berti Vogts, and Clemens Westerhoff – on how each has debuted new internationals during their tenure as national team coach.  We have selected the eight coaches deliberately, for this report, based on presiding over a significant number of ...