Nigerian football in meltdown!

Things have never been this dire for the leadership of the Nigeria Football Federation. Almost two years into the tenure of the present board, Nigeria’s fortune in football has dipped to its lowest level ever.
The Super Eagles have failed to qualify for the last two Africa Cup of Nations championships. The team has plunged in the Fifa rankings to 70th position in the world. There is also now the real possibility that the team will not qualify for the 2018 World Cup, considering the state of the team, its recent poor run, and the extremely difficult group it shares with Cameroun, Algeria, and Zambia, three of the strongest teams in Africa.
In the age-group competitions, where the country is known to do extremely well, the country’s Under-20 national team, the Flying Eagles, lost at home to Sudan in the second leg of the qualifying match for the African Youth Championship. With that defeat Nigeria will be missing from the next championship. Nigeria will also be missing to defend the FIFA U-17 World Cup the country won following the failure of the Golden Eaglets to qualify from Africa.
The response to this state of affairs is to hire a new foreign coach to rescue the Super Eagles. Everything else was excused and accepted by Nigerians but the failure of their flagship team. Its fate has often marked the fate of the board of the NFF. Now there is ‘fire on the mountain’ and the NFF leadership has been running helter skelter  to steady their rocking ship.
The search for foreign coach alone dominated conversations in the country in the past week, following the dramatic failure of the technical committee to seal the deal of their pre-ordained choice in a well-planned but poorly executed plot to return Nigeria to the era of foreign coaches.
The decision generated a lot of controversy between those who think Nigerians have grown enough in the game of football to manage their own national team, and those who think that only foreign coaches have the capacity and stature to do the national team job properly.
Both sides have their points, even though the facts are clear: most of the foreign coaches the country has hired after Professor Otto Gloria in 1980 have been very ordinary at best, and have not been justified by the results they achieved (except in the case of Clemens Westerhof). Add to this the allegations of dirty financial deals often associated with the exercise, the astronomical sums these ordinary unknown European coaches were paid, and their consistent failure to achieve the desired goals, and one is left with the lingering question of what our administrators find in these foreign journey-men coaches that our local but well qualified and experienced coaches do not have. Foreign coaches in Nigeria have not done what Nigerian coaches have failed to do. The statistics are available for all to see.
Sometimes, I start to think that this belittling of Nigerian coaches is the psychological debris of a colonial mentality that condemns everything local as primitive and unproductive, and everything foreign as civilised and superior.
In truth, the scorecard of the Nigerian coaches, drawn from a pool of ex-internationals, particularly in the past two years, has not helped their defense and may actually have become the excess baggage that the current NFF must shed to avoid the consequences of their failure to qualify for two consecutive African Cup of Nations and, from the look of things, the next World Cup.
With this very real final threat, the NFF leadership took the initially unpopular decision to return the national team to the romance with foreign coaches and appoint Frenchman, Paul Le Guen, as the new coach of the Super Eagles.
Unfortunately, at the very last minute, Le Guen, for reasons only known to him, abandoned ship. After the shenanigan of a screening process and an interview conducted via Skype, the technical committee announced Le Guen as their choice.
To the shock of everyone including the NFF leadership, a few hours after the announcement, Le Guen went on social media to humiliate the NFF and indeed, all Nigerians, by declining the offer with the excuse that he could not live in Nigeria.
Why did he apply in the first place if he knew that Nigeria was unsafe or uninhabitable for his ‘Royal Majesty’? Or was his name just picked from the blue and inserted among those who applied? Was the vacancy advertised for any interested coaches to apply? Or were coaches simply handpicked by the NFF? Why were more experienced, more qualified coaches not invited?
The NFF’s reaction to the shame was an announcement that the man wanted to coach the Eagles by working from France just as a few previous foreign coaches had done and got away with.
Any which way, the entire country has been caught up in this international humiliation.
What has now happened is that the NFF have offered the job, albeit temporarily, to Salisu Yussuf, a Nigerian, with neither the stature nor the pedigree for the challenge ahead.
It is almost certain that this journey, which the NFF leadership has embarked upon, is leading nowhere. I can already smell the odious exit of the team from the 2018 World Cup qualifying group.
But for now, without question, Nigerian football is in a meltdown.

Culled from superspor
QUOTE: “In the age-group competitions, where the country is known to do extremely well, the country’s Under-20 national team, the Flying Eagles, lost at home to Sudan in the second leg of the qualifying match for the African Youth Championship. With that defeat Nigeria will be missing from the next championship. Nigeria will also be missing to defend the FIFA U-17 World Cup the country won following the failure of the Golden Eaglets to qualify from Africa.”