By Coach Uni Dan Kakwi
Football in Nigeria is formed on a wrong foundation and principle. Our league has the highest number of clubs in Africa but our players are underdeveloped due to bad infrastructures and the low tactical and technical knowledge of most grassroots coaches of today…
The system is so polluted that anybody can just wake up anywhere and start-up academy without going through thorough screening…
If you ask most of the academy owners, what are their purpose of starting an academy project? They will all give you the same answer!
Selling players abroad, that’s all they can offer!
Academy is more than just kicking the ball and selling players…
Let me tell you this, Nigerian football is struggling today because we find ourselves in a situation where we can’t produce our consumption…
We need to change our mindset from this entitlement mentality…
We need to start thinking of developing stars for our local consumption and in the process, the players will receive the required psychological, mental, physical, tactical, and technical information coupled with a sound diet before moving abroad…
Grassroots coaches should concentrate on developing talents and not trying to do the job of football administrations…
Instead of asking for a league to resume that is below amateur standard.
I expect grassroots and local coaches to use this opportunity to demand from State and Federal Football body’s to do the needful by renovating training centers, football stadiums and etc…
For over 2 months the league has been on break, my question to all!
What have we done in terms of infrastructures?
What have we done in terms of medical facilities?
Do we now have vibrators in all the stadium?
Will all the players go through a medical fitness test before going back to the field?
Cardiological check? doping control?
Is there any psychological and mental test?
Burnout syndromes and depression are real in sports…
Some players consume tramadol and codeine before games…
We can’t allow these guys to waste their lives all in the name of football…
Those casualties Nigeria football suffered some months ago are avoidable, it happened based on human error and unprofessionalism of the highest order…
These are the things the coaches are supposed to be crying out loud for right now because they need quality tools to produce quality products…
We can’t fold our hands and hope that one day a player will spring up from somewhere in Europe with a Nigerian father and we expect him/them to come and play for Nigeria…
What have you invested in the player?
We can’t continue to consume what we don’t produce, let’s try and convert our productions into consumption…
My heart bleeds when I see top Government officials including the leader of the administrations flying abroad almost every weekend to support their so-called clubs in Europe that will not even recognize their presence in-stadium all in the name of I want to belong whereby they are turning our stadium into a graveyard…
Black Lives will never matter until we build our own…
You can’t be moving on the wrong road and then you expect to get to the right destination, it will never work, you need a turn and that is now in Nigeria football…
There is a massive disadvantage gap, and the only chance we have to bridge the gap is to set up a system that will bring us back to the drawing board…
We have too many incompetent people jumping around the vital positions in this Country… The government should as a matter of urgency establish research institutes in every state to Fastrack growth and development because football is a mega business that can increase our annual GDP.
The time Nigeria really enjoyed the game at the highest level was when we allowed a process to develop and was between 1988 to 1998 it was a glorious 10 years, I will still suggest that we allow this process to grow, and afterward, we can now ask questions!
A society that wants to grow must operate in a long-term planning system because a functional system will not have abandon a project…
