Football Nigeria -- Eagles Etcetera

A few days ago, we provided data showing number of players who progress from Nigeria's U17 to the full national team -- Super Eagles. In this piece, we use similar methods to show the progression from U20 Flying Eagles to the Super Eagles. As should be expected, the results are better from the U20 level to the full national team. Key to Understanding the Method and Results Note that only U20 squads that participated at the FIFA World Youth Cup (WYC) have been used for this analysis. In essence, this covers 10 squads from 1983 until 2013. With the 2013 squad, we do not conduct all analyses because this squad is recent and more of its players are expected to do more at the Super Eagles level in a few years to come. New data provided in this piece compares the U17 and U20 squads in terms of average number of players from each squad that progress to the Super Eagles. This is provided in Figure 1. While just about four (4) players from a U17 squad are likely to play a game  at the ...

Nigeria has dominated world youth football over the years, winning more titles than any other country at the U17 level. In the next few months, Nigeria will again defend its U17 title in Chile and its U20 team (made up of former world conquering U17 players) will hope to become the first Nigerian team to win the World U20 title. However, winning the U17 or U20 titles is not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to have the players develop and contribute at the Super Eagles level and dominate the world at the zenith of soccer. That is yet to happen. In this piece, we investigate how these youth players, specifically from the U17 level where Nigeria has been so dominant, impact the full national team A "Super Eagles." Method We investigate each year that Nigeria has played at the U17 World Championship. The goal is to identify the number of players from each of those teams that move on to play for the Super Eagles. We also measure impact by enumerating how many players f...