Why Nigerian football is retrogressing, 83-yr-old Onigbinde laments

Chief Adegboye Onigbinde is a two-time coach of Nigeria’s men’s senior football team, the Super Eagles. He was the first indigenous coach to take Nigeria to the final of the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) before the team lost to Cameroon in 1984. The octogenarian tactician also coached the Super Eagles at the 2002 Korea/Japan World Cup. The former FIFA and CAF Instructor on the sideline of a football tournament named after him, Adegboye Onigbinde U17 Football Tournament Project, in this interview with Tribunesport’s TAOFEEK LAWAL spoke on the need for Nigeria to have trained technical analysts to discover talents at the grassroots, among other issues. Excerpts:

Here is a tournament named after you which expectedly is to discover talents to feed the national teams, especially the U17 team, the Golden Eaglets. What do you think should be the main objective of the tournament?

While I appreciate what the organisers have done in my honour, there is very little I can do to interfere with what they are doing. But when you have this kind of a grassroots competition, it is not only a grassroots competition and that is one thing that is missing in Nigerian football. What is the purpose of organising competitions? The main purpose is to be able to discover talents. But before you can do that, you must have trained some people who are technical analysts. Nigeria does not have one trained technical analyst, and that is why Nigerian football is going down. We are not identifying the talents, not to talk of developing them. I hope by the time they move to the second stanza of this tournament, maybe next year, they would have made an adequate arrangement to have some people trained as technical analysts who will be identifying talents. I sincerely appreciate the efforts they are making and what I say was missing was not about this particular competition but in Nigerian football. Do we have an analyst for our national league or Challenge Cup/FA Cup matches? And that is why I said that football is dying in this country because there is no effort to identify new talents and then develop them into stars.

In what way do you think Nigerian football can be revived?

That is left to the administrators. Nigerians have left me out of football.

But sir, whether one likes it or not, you are still a major stakeholder in football not only in Nigeria but in the world and whatever solutions you proffer will still be needed.

Will the people in authority want to hear my name? I will be talking into empty air. Let’s leave it to the administrators to decide on how they want to improve Nigerian football. I have written series of papers, granted series of interviews and instead of appreciating, they hate me for it. So, what do you do? I don’t think I need to impose myself or my idea on anybody. I don’t have that intention. Of what relevance am I to Nigerian football today?

But you are very relevant and people know that.

Is it in the administrative or the technical aspect that I am recognised? There is a saying in Yoruba that “If somebody who is holding a plate of food is hiding it away from me, by the time he offers it, I will refuse to eat it”. I wish the administrators the best of luck.

Gernot Rohr has been the Super Eagles coach in the past five years, and we are yet to see the first eleven. He keeps on inviting players more or less experimenting with them. What will be your take on this?

That is left between him and his employers. But that is the greatest calamity that has ever happened to football in this country. Somebody has been there for five years and we don’t have a standing team. In 1983 when I took up the national team job, the first time an African was handling the Nigerian national team, within a year I was at the African Cup (AFCON) final. I would have won that Cup but it was Nigerians who went into the match, the same thing in 2002 when I was called back to prepare the team for the World Cup. By FIFA schedule, you have four years to prepare a team for the World Cup but I had three months but prepared a team; a new team. The team had been disbanded in Mali in February after the Nations Cup and I was called in March to prepare a team in three months for the 2002 World Cup. I got some young boys together, but the greatest mistake I made then was allowing some of the old players to come into the team. Before those players came in, we played seven friendly matches, won five and drew two. Of the five we won was beating Ireland and Scotland on their grounds and Jamaica. It was not all of them (the old players) but it was one of two that came and destabilised the team. What I am saying is this, because we are talking about Rohr the first function of a coach is to identify talents and after that develop them into stars. How many players has he identified and how many has he developed? When I was going to the World Cup in 2002, I started fully from home-based players. I discovered Vincent Enyeama at a league match in Abeokuta, I think Enyimba versus Julius Berger. He eventually became number five in the world and served Nigeria for a very long time. I discovered Rashidi Yekini in Kaduna or so and up till now he remains one of the best strikers Nigeria has ever produced. I am not singing my own praise. I do things because God gives me the ability to do them and all glory goes to God. We are playing our league matches in this country without analysts. Competition in sports is like examinations in school. A teacher conducts an examination to find out how much the pupils have learnt from what he has taught. Are we analysing our matches here? I worked with FIFA for 20 years and CAF for 25 years. That was what I was doing for them. At cup finals, some of us would be selected to identify talents for another country. The form we were using at FIFA and CAF level was designed by me. I gave it to Nigeria. Are we analysing our matches? We are behaving like a teacher who conducts an examination and refuses to mark the scripts. That is exactly what is happening. We are not marking the scripts. The Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) should have been interested in this competition, get some technical analysts to pick talents but have we trained any technical analyst in this country? In the colonial days, teacher’s training was virtually free. I went through it; Grade 3, Grade 2, Grade 1. It was virtually free because they believed that you must have good teachers before you can have good education. In football, you must have good coaches for you to have good footballers. We are doing what we like in this country we are not organising football as per FIFA instructions. In FIFA statutes under objectives, the number one objective is “To improve the game of football constantly”. What are we doing in this country to improve football? We promote football, organise competitions, clap and everybody goes home. We are only promoting football and not developing it. And football development is the number one objective in FIFA statute.

Could this be one of the reasons our clubs fumble in continental competitions?

It is not one of but the major reason. Of recent, the Central African Republic (CAR) came here and beat us. They keep telling us stories. Some of these African countries that are giving us tough time are operating what I taught them as FIFA Instructor. But who am I in Nigerian football? I am not looking for a job. There is another section even administratively FIFA Statute says: ‘A governing board of any football body must be democratically elected’. When did we conduct elections into Rangers’ and Shooting Stars’ board? Which means they are not clubs. In this country today, we don’t  have one single football club. What we have are parastatals and FIFA respects all governments but they don’t recognise them in football. They have no business in football. Most clubs in Nigeria today are run by government.

What do you think Shooting Stars Sports Club now back in the Nigeria Professional Football League (NPFL) should do to remain in that top cadre?

I have been in Shooting Stars seven times and seven times I have been rejected. I have no advice for them.

But no matter what, the players will still sip from your cup of knowledge. They are your children and even your grandchildren.

What can the players do for themselves? It is the duty of the administrators to do that, but are they ready to do anything? Or should I go there and take over? That is not possible. I have been there (3SC) seven times and seven times I have been rejected. They only remember that a panel beater is around when the club is in trouble, and that is Onigbinde. And the moment I come in to reshape things, they would start the agitations and before they raise their hands, I’m off. I am not a job seeker.

Are you impressed with what the government has done to remodel the Lekan Salami Stadium?

I know they spent a lot of money, but I have said there are lapses. Look at the day the stadium was opened. Two matches were played and eventually they became water polo. There was no underground drainage and the players were playing on water. That didn’t allow us to see the good quality. Secondly, all the seats were covered. We were lucky there was rain that day, the weather was cool. We will see what will happen when the stadium is full during a hot weather. I pray we will not be carrying dead bodies. I commend the government for committing so much money but doing it well is another thing. It is not the fault of the government. Some people were employed to do it. I have written papers on this too that you can solve a lot of Nigeria’s problems with sports.

Most crimes committed in this country today are juvenile-oriented. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) approved over 40 sports. Let Nigeria adopt 20 and make sure that every local government has a team in this country. Let’s take football for instance. We have female and male teams in which we have four different categories. U12, U15, U17, U19 which will engage the youths positively. Let’s talk about boys alone now. If each local government has four teams and each team takes care of 30 boys. That is 120 boys multiplied by the number of local government areas in Nigeria. With this arrangement, you could have taken more than 90,000 boys off the streets. These youngsters need to be positively engaged and they won’t have the time for crime.

Do you see a bright future for Nigerian football?

It depends on what the administrators do with it; and some of what they are supposed to do is what I have been talking about. The papers I have written are bulky. Let them go and look at them. If I drop dead today, will anyone say it is premature death at 83? What am I looking for? I am not a job seeker, so let them continue to do it the way they want to do it. That is not saying if they genuinely want advice that one would not give them for as long as we are living. But these people who should take advice are the people who would still go out and say Baba is too difficult because I will not allow them to ‘chop’. Good luck to Nigeria.