USA: Graveyard becomes garden for Nigerian footballers

Segun Odegbami

If Thompson Usiyen had not migrated to the USA when he did in 1976, but had waited to play during the last qualifier against Tunisia in 1977 for the 1978 World Cup, every Nigerian that knew the mercurial talent of the young goal-scoring machine at the time, believed that Nigeria would have beaten Tunisia at home and qualified for the FIFA World Cup for the first time. 

Nigerian football and Nigeria’s place in the world of football would never have been the same. The birth of global football superstars and the growth of the football industry in Nigeria would have come a lot earlier than it did from 1994. Thompson’s sudden exit from Nigeria’s national team truncated that great movement to Nigeria’s appearance at a World Cup.

It also cost him a fantastic career in World football. With his skills and goal-scoring ability he would have been in the class of the biggest and best players in the world at the time. He was that good. His ‘setback’ was that he went to America in the hope of advancing his football.    Although he came from America on one occasion to play with the Green Eagles during the third All African Games in Algiers, in 1978, the standard of American football had blunted his skills and it was obvious he was not the same player that left two years before. 

After Algiers ’78, Thompson never came back to play again in the Nigerian national team. Effectively, his movement to America also marked the end of his international football career.    His story is not unique. It is about the same for a legion of other exceptionally gifted Nigerian footballers who were also lured with scholarships to get an education in the USA and to represent their American Colleges and Universities in soccer, as Americans refer