The president of 36-Lion FC of Lagos Alhaji Liameed Gafar has insisted that, for Nigeria to take its rightful place in the upper stratum of the world football, sentiments which has been the ‘clog in the wheel’ of our footballing prowess must be outrightly thrown on the scrapheap.
Nigeria is blessed with young and talented players dispersed across the states but only few make it to the top most especially the national teams.
The Lagos born football entrepreneur who has shown class in recent years in the way he used to outsource for jutting talents noted that, there’s a need to place merit above sentiment if the trend must be discontinued.
“The way to discontinue the anomaly is to have effective national scouting system, devoid of sentiment.
“NFF should task the states FA to keep the statistics and coordinate raw talents from schools and academy before recommending them to age grade national teams.
“The major problem we have is that talented players are often overlooked and subsequently dispensed to force way for one-week magic players.
“Before you say football, you see those players donning the national team color already, an effective scouting system will see players graduating from divisions to state and from the state to national teams,” Hajji Gafar as he’s fondly called who is a member of Illinois Youth Soccer Association (IYSA) USA, told a premier Soccer Platform, Family United By Football FUBF on Friday evening.
Gafar Liameed has done tremendously well for grassroots and he’s the first Nigerian to invest in building a Football and vocational school with two standard FIFA ‘C’ pitches and a mini pitch of 5*5 playing field.
