Football Nigeria -- Eagles Etcetera

The new national team coach, Sunday Oliseh, has his hands full as he attempts to craft a new national team capable of re-occupying the champion position in Africa's football. It won't be an easy challenge. Oliseh, however, is quite capable at least going by his leadership traits, his knowledge, and perhaps his publicly stated commitment. For most Nigerians, there is of course the tendency to overstate the quality of talent available to the national team. The reality is the quality is not at a high level. When a country cites as its best players the players on the bench of Europe's powerful teams or average players on Europe's middle level teams or those in Nigeria's youth team, it ought to be a sign of how deprived the talent pool really is. In any case, in order not to despair, it is not always that teams must have the best talents to become champion. There are several examples of this. But there must be realization that talent is indeed a critical starting point...

Over the years, critics of Nigeria's performance have increasingly argued that the Super Eagles have done poorly against Africa's top teams while feasting on lower rated African teams. In this piece, we intend to investigate this claim relying on match result data. First, we look at Africa's Top 10 teams in each year since 2006 (i.e. last 10 years) and then calculate Nigeria's performance against those teams in that calendar year. This process enables us to address the following questions: (1) How has Nigeria done annually against Africa's Top 10 in the last decade? (2) Second, we also look at results against African teams that rank outside the Top 10. How has Nigeria done against these lower ranked teams? Method To determine Africa's Top 10 teams in the last year we rely on FIFA's ranking data. We were able to locate FIFA rankings for each year since 2006 but from different months of each year. Thus, instead of comparing ranks for June in each year, ...