Assessing the Home-Based Project....
As is always the case with Super Eagles' fans, there has to be a binary view on every issue. The most recent binary view is support or non-support for the way Nigeria has used home-based players in the national team. In this piece, we intend to deeply review the use of home-based players, particularly in light of the upcoming African Championships for Nations (CHAN), to determine how the project has been implemented and its results. In the mid-1990s and into the early 2000s, the use of foreign-based players became a Nigerian credo. It was not just the Super Eagles. There were moves to stack all male national teams, including U-17, with foreign-based players. However, for this piece we compare the current use of home-based players to previous attempts to use home-based players post-2000 Nations Cup. You may ask, why post-2000 Nations Cup? We have used that baseline because it was in 2000 that the then Coach Johaness Bonfrere claimed that locally based players were not good enough to...