Can the NPFL Save the Leftover Flying Eagles?

With the FIFA U-20 World Cup in New Zealand over for Nigeria, there are bound to be the Flying Eagles players who will not get contracts with European clubs as well as clubs in North Africa and South Africa. So what becomes of these players? How do they continue their career development and ensure they remain in top shape and stay valuable to the national teams until they have an opportunity to achieve their dreams of playing in Europe?

Had the Nigerian Professional Football League been a vibrant success, many of these players left without overseas contracts would have joined clubs locally and continued their development, and probably even become bigger in the future than those that left early for Europe.

However as things stand, for many of these talented players – including those that did not make the final squad to New Zealand - playing in the NPFL is almost not an option for a variety of reasons that I will enunciate later.

The danger of being caught in a limbo is that it could ultimately lead to the end of the promising careers of these youngsters who would rather continue to chase shadows in the name of wanting to play overseas.

Let us be clear that while youth international tournaments have produced world class stars like Kanu Nwankwo, John Mikel Obi, Michael Essien and the like, they are also known not to have produced a mass of successful players. However my argument is that continuous engagement and competition is the surest way to development and success.

For now it would be difficult to see the NPFL as an exciting proposition for these players and their agents. Money is a big issue, professional respect is another, while the opportunity for the sustained development – real or imagined - of their talents is a third. There is also the pressure from agents and families who want their sons to succeed where the money is a lot.

After winning the U-17 World Cup title two years ago, a number of talented players like Kelechi Iheanacho, Isaac Success, Musa Yahaya, Chidera Ezeh and Chidiebere Nwakali secured contracts with top clubs in Europe while other vital players like skipper Musa Mohammed, Akinjide Idowu, Samuel Okon, Aliyu Abubakar, Saviour Godwin and Taiwo Awoniyi failed to land top overseas clubs.

Most of these boys did not join the youth setups of the NPFL clubs, but opted to stay in their academies and wait for opportunities to open up overseas. Fortunately for the players a number of them still had the trust of head coach Manu Garba, who had been moved up to the U-20 team, so they were at least moved en masse to the Flying Eagles. After this U-20 World Cup however, given their ages, the latitude to stay away from competitive club football as their contemporaries enter the final stages of their youth development and break into senior teams, all but disappears. So the most viable option would be playing locally. However only a few will be patient or humble enough to lie low and join our clubs so that they can keep playing and developing until a bigger chance opens up for them.

One reason why this is so is that the gulf in lifestyles between the players that succeed to find clubs in Europe and those who remain in Nigeria is unbearably wide. Even those in the North African leagues and South Africa would have experienced much better upgrades in their lifestyles than those who have to play locally, where they will struggle to get clubs to pay them N200,000 a month. That kind of money is probably what their foreign-based former teammates now earn in a day or two, in addition to training with top youth handlers and in some of the game’s best training facilities.

While playing overseas has its drawbacks for young African talents and might not necessarily translate to better development in their careers than the man who knuckles down and plays locally, the pressure that comes with knowing that your peers have moved so much higher up in class is so enormous that it ends the careers of many of these talented youngsters.

Also, the publicity and respect given to the foreign-based players by the media, fans and national team handlers makes it easy for greedy and shortsighted agents to entice these players with promises of contracts in all kinds of overseas leagues including the likes of Malta, Thailand, India and so on. Many that are shipped to Europe end up doing nothing but menial jobs as they wait for an opportunity that in a lot of cases never comes.

However were the NPFL extremely competitive, with ambitious clubs going for high stakes and paying decent wages to achieve their goals, these players will be engaged and will get better respect. They and other emerging young talents may consequently not see the need to flee their home especially when going overseas is no guarantee of success. This would be great for our clubs which can then be more competitive, while the driven players will continue their developments seamlessly until a bigger deal happens.

Life in Europe is tough for our young talents for a variety of reasons. In Nigeria for instance, they will not suffer the discrimination of being black, and from Africa, that would put them on the queue behind home ground talents as well as those from other European countries and South America. It takes almost a special talent like Iheanacho to scale over the hurdles.

Playing at home means you develop under conditions suited to you, from the weather to the culture and style of play as well as the adulation and support from friends and family. However like I mentioned earlier this would only be the case if the NPFL were a more competitive league with better funded clubs that face competition for high stakes and are followed by local fans. If our leagues offered that there will no longer be the insane desire to play overseas at any cost. And that way these young talents may even develop at a much better rate than their peer overseas, meaning that Nigeria ultimate exports better finished talents.

The era when we exported top talents like Finidi George, Sunday Oliseh, Daniel Amokachi, Peter Rufai, Rashidi Yekini, Samson Siasia and the like was the era when they developed at home and achieved a certain level of maturity before they went overseas. These days our youngsters hardly ever make it through decent training programmes before they make the national teams and disappear overseas. Players like Sani Emmanuel, Fortune Chukwudi, Stanley Okoro, Edafe Egbedi from the 2009 U-17 class have disappeared, while their more successful contemporaries like Kayode Olarenwaju, Abdul Ajagun and Kenneth Omeruo are still fighting to establish themselves.

As I have always pushed in this column, Nigeria badly needs the NPFL to succeed as the positives are legion. Beyond creating thousands of new jobs all round and the attendant wealth to society, it would make our players and consequently national teams so much more successful.

Here is wishing the young men from the New Zealand campaign much more success than in the past. It would also be wise for those that fail to make it to clubs in Europe to be patient and disciplined enough to continue their development in the NPFL, especially given the seriousness with which the League Management Company has fought to restore the league to its glory days.