CAF inter-club competitions: Stagnated football development makes minnows of Nigerian clubs

In the last six seasons, Nigerian clubs have found it difficult to go beyond the second round in CAF inter-club competitions. Amid this poor continental showing, CHRISTIAN OKPARA writes that getting Nigerian clubs to championship-winning level requires a lot more than what is on the ground, which includes poor planning continental competitions, a dearth of gaffers with sound tactical and technical abilities, and the failure to align the domestic calendar with international football calendar.

Nigerian football is a contradiction. At the national team level, the country has players that compete favourably against their peers in Africa and beyond, with its stars almost always in contention for Africa’s best players’ awards.

Nigeria has won the African Footballer of the Year crown back-to-back in the last two years, with Victor Osimhen taking the title in 2023, and Ademola Lookman retaining it last year.

But at the club level, Nigerian clubs are hardly reckoned with nowadays. This is because since Heartland Football Club of Owerri and Kano Pillars played in the semifinals of the CAF Champions League in 2009, no Nigerian club has gone as far as the last four in Africa’s top inter-club competition.

Worse still, the country’s candidates have failed to go beyond the quarterfinals of the second-tier CAF Confederation Cup, a competition that no Nigerian club has won since the African body merged the Cup Winners Cup with the CAF Cup in 2004.

The situation has not always been this bad. The fact is, in the 1970s up to the early 2000s, Nigerian clubs were among the strongest teams in Africa, with the country’s league ranked among the best five in the continent.

At various times iconic clubs like Enugu Rangers, IICC Shooting Stars, Bendel