Young managers, new face of Nigerian Football

Nigeria boasts a storied, decorated history at youth level in international football.Since the inception of the FIFA Under-17 World Cup in 1985, no nation has won it more times than Nigeria’s five, and from those triumphs have arisen some of the sport’s finest exponents, from Nwankwo Kanu to Victor Osimhen.

That spring has begun to run dry in recent times, however. The country’s last success came in 2015, and while a nine-year barren spell is by no means instructive by itself, the Golden Eaglets have been absent from two of the three editions since.

The idea that youth football development has taken a nosedive is not limited to the under-17 cadre, however. Despite being the first African nation to win Olympic gold in men’s football – an under-23 event – and completing the set of medals with a bronze in 2016, Nigeria is conspicuous by its absence at the ongoing Paris Olympics, and did not qualify to Tokyo in 2021 either.

Considering Nigeria’s peculiar environment, this inability to consistently qualify for tournaments at youth level is both a cause and an effect. For so long, football development in the country has lacked a coherent, holistic framework or blueprint, and so it has fallen to the youth national teams to bootstrap the process through unwieldy, inefficient open screenings, held in strategic centres across the country. Invariably, talent slips through the cracks, as the aforementioned Osimhen famously almost did back in 2014 but, even worse, there is little transparency around the selection methodology. At best, it is left to the whims of the coaches and, at worst, the extraneous influence of interested parties who boast fat wallets and few scruples.

It also is a matter of public debate whether, with so much