Nigerian football is agitating for a change following the country’s string of failures in the game. CHRISTIAN OKPARA writes that rather than searching for new personnel, the game needs a total restructuring to pave the way for the best hands to mount the saddle.

It is generally acknowledged that efficient management drives sports development by optimising resource allocation, ensuring financial or operational sustainability, and creating clear paths from grassroots programmes to elite competitive success.

Top-notch management transforms raw athletic talent into structured, scalable and successful sports organisations. It directs limited funds, grants, and sponsorships toward high-impact areas like athlete training and safe facilities.

Experts believe that effective strategic leadership employs diverse approaches to foster a forward-looking perspective, articulate a clear vision, and drive organisational learning.

In their paper, ‘Strategic Leadership in Elite Sport Organisations, a Systematic Review of Governance, Leadership, and Performance Systems’, published in the Frontiers for Active Living Series on July 28, 2026, Abdelaziz Qarouach, John Cairney, and Nadia Saqri hinge success in sports on the ability of the leaders to manage the particular sport carefully, adapting to the constant changes in sports development.

So, to be successful in the modern game, managers should be capable of developing and executing innovative strategies that integrate management and leadership approaches to foster long-term growth and address nationwide challenges. When leadership or management shows a dangerous inability to cope with the demands of the job, presidents and other top-ranking executives often step down in an ideal society to allow others to lead the search for success.

For instance, the Italian Football Association president resigned after the Azzurri failed to qualify for the World Cup. His resignation came alongside high-profile departures within the delegation after missing successive global tournaments.

In Asia, shortly after his country’s group-stage exit at the 2026 World Cup in North America, the president of the South Korean FA, Chung Mong-gyu, stepped down following harsh criticism from the country’s football stakeholders.

Mong-gyu was promptly followed by his Saudi Arabian counterpart, Yasser Al-Misehal, who resigned after his team fell at the first hurdle in its seventh appearance.

In contrast, since Nigeria failed for a second consecutive time to qualify for the World Cup, followed by the Super Falcons’ inability to make the Women’s World Cup for the first time in the history of the game, as well as the mass failures by the country’s men’s youth teams to make their African championships, there has been debate over the propriety of the Ibrahim Gusau-led Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) continuing to lead the country’s game.

With elections for a new board for the NFF barely one month away, Gusau’s insistence on running for a second tenure in office has generated so much anger across the land that many stakeholders have started questioning the leadership recruitment architecture of the country’s number one sport.

This is because, if the elections are held under the current NFF statute, which gives 37 voting rights to the state association chairmen out of the 54 voters, Gusau’s return to power is a foregone conclusion.

While stakeholders agree that Gusau, like every other Nigerian, has the right to contest for any position in the NFF elections, where they differ is that the process is stacked against every other person because the number of voting rights given to the FA chairmen, which is a single bloc in the congress, has made it impossible for any “outsider” to challenge for the top football position.

It has not always been this lopsided in favour of the FA chairmen. Until the 2010 amendment of the statute, the Sports Ministry, the School Sports Federation of Nigeria, the coaches association, the physical and health constituency of tertiary institutions, referees association, players association, military and para-military constituency, youth sports federation, the body of academies, and sports writers were members of the electorate and decided who became a member of the NFF board.

Things changed when the federation’s name was changed from the Nigeria Football Association (NFA) to the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF), and many of the voting associations were removed from the congress.

So, for anybody to become a member of the board, they must be in the good books of the FA chairmen, who control the majority of votes in the process.

For many stakeholders, the real change in the fortunes of the country’s football will happen when the laws guiding entrance into leadership positions in the game are changed to allow.

One of the stakeholders, England-based sports analyst Osasu Obayuwana, insists that the country has enough competent professionals to transform the game if its institutions are properly structured. For every qualified Nigerian to aspire to such positions.

The former member of the NFF Governance Reform Committee between 2018 and 2020 said his experience on the committee convinced him that deep-rooted administrative weaknesses were hindering the development of Nigerian football.

He said the committee produced detailed recommendations to improve the governance of the NFF, but alleged that the federation’s leadership at the time ignored the proposals.

While acknowledging that Nigeria has people capable of managing football at the highest level, England-based sports analyst Osasu Obayiuwana maintained that personnel alone would not solve the country’s problems.

He argued that the institutions themselves must be restructured to promote merit, competence, accountability and integrity.

For a former defender, Emeka Ezeugo, the NFF’s malaise has lingered because many competent football persons have shied away from the NFF, thus allowing “incompetent scavengers” to hijack Nigerian football.

He said: “The players have watched as NFF bigwigs divide their union, while those who should have come out to challenge the mess in the NFF have failed to do so…If Morocco can get to the semifinals of the World Cup, Nigeria can win the trophy. But we need to start doing the right things to achieve that.”

Insisting that former footballers and sports journalists must close ranks to save the situation, he added: “Some of us only complain when the Super Eagles fail to qualify for the World Cup, but we have not done anything collectively to ensure that qualified people get into the NFF to affect the way things are done.

For Nigerian football to regain the heights it achieved in 1994, when the country was rated the fifth-best football-playing nation in the world, former Ondo Football Association board member, Dr Babatunde Akinbinu, said that the authorities must look at how the entire pyramid is built from the bottom up.

He said that there is nothing inherently wrong with the statutory framework of the NFF executive council itself, adding: “Having a president and vice presidents representing the various geopolitical zones is standard practice. It mirrors how CAF and FIFA handle regional balance, and having that federal character in a diverse nation makes sense on paper.”

He said, however, that the real issue is the broken machinery that feeds into it from the base.
“Everything traces back to the 36+1 State FA chairmen who hold the decisive voting power at the national congress. The core problem is how those chairmen get into power at the state level in the first place.

The local government area football associations, which ought to form the foundational voting bloc, are deliberately kept opaque and closed off.

“Instead of opening the local council leadership to dynamic professionals, local business owners, tax-paying citizens, and individuals with proven track records in other endeavours who can bring real capacity and passion into the game, the system is kept tight and narrow. Leaving it exclusively to small groups of coaches, referees, or former players leaves the base vulnerable to moneybags who simply buy their way up to the state and national levels to secure status, foreign trips, and influence.”

According to Akinbinu, “because the base is so tightly controlled, you end up with State FA chairmen holding onto power for 15 or 20 years without showing a single piece of evidence that they have developed grassroots football, built infrastructure, or run proper local leagues in their states.

A former Super Eagles midfielder, Paul Okoku, also sees the solution to the problems dogging the country’s game in the restructuring of the NFF’s congress. He picks the Ghana model as an example that can lead to a Nigerian-unique style capable of answering all the questions in the quest for an effective football federation.

Okoku believes that Nigeria has a lot to learn from Ghana’s 124-member Congress, which distributes electoral power across a much broader football constituency.

Okoku said the contrast between the NFF and what is obtainable in Ghana raises an important question about representation, balance and the future of Nigerian football governance.

He said that an election is shaped not only by the candidates on the ballot, but also by the composition of the electorate. “That is why the structure of the NFF Congress deserves serious examination. Nigeria does not have to travel to Europe to find an instructive comparison. It can look across West Africa to Ghana.

“Ghana does not have a perfect football administration, and this article does not suggest that Nigeria should simply copy Ghana’s constitution. But Ghana offers something useful, a different way of distributing electoral power among football stakeholders.

“Nigeria has expanded its congress, but 37 of 54 votes remain in one constituency. For years, discussions about NFF elections centred on the familiar 44-vote congress. The increase from 44 to 54 represents a genuine expansion of the electorate. But expansion alone does not settle the question of balance. The 36 State FAs and the FCT hold 37 of the 54 votes, approximately 68.5 per cent of the entire voting strength. That figure deserves attention because it shows where electoral power remains concentrated.”