Nigerian Captainship: From Chukwu to Enyeama.....

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 Nigeria and Enyeama and Chukwu both started all competitive games that they played for Nigeria. Of all the captains, Nwankwo Kanu started the least number of games played for Nigeria at 62.4% of games and Enyeama captained the least number of games played (18%).

Other results are Enyeama's 92.5 average minutes played in competitive games. Note that this is higher than the regulation of 90 minutes because some of those games went 120 minutes because of extra time. Kanu played the least minutes appearing in only an average of 56.7 minutes in competitive games. Sunday Oliseh's captainship produced the highest efficiency scores in competitive games played at 68.3% with Yobo's being the closest at 65.7%. The full data are presented below:

EFFICIENCY SCORES
                                    All Games                   Competitive Games
Chukwu                           60.9                           59.8
Enyeama                          64.4                           64.4
Kanu                                51.5                           57.1
Keshi                                54.8                           57.4
Oliseh                               62.3                           68.3
Yobo                                65.2                           65.7

ALL GAMES
                                  Games     %cpt      %Started           Mins.

Chukwu                      56            84%        100.0%           88.7
Enyeama                     84            18%          97.6%           87.5
Kanu                           85            27%          62.4%           56.3
Keshi                          65             45%          93.8%           84.6
Oliseh                          55            44%          98.2%           88.2
Yobo                           93             48%         94.6%           85.4

COMPETITIVE GAMES
                                  Games       %cpt        %Started       Mins.

Chukwu                       34            97.1%      100.0%          88.7
Enyeama                      69            22.0%      100.0%          92.5
Kanu                            65            23.1%        61.5%          56.7
Keshi                            46            41.3%       95.6%           87.3
Oliseh                           46            47.8%       95.7%           89.2    
Yobo                            73            46.6%        94.5%          85.4

**To learn more about Nigerian soccer statistics checkout CHUKASTATS at Amazon.com books.

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