CAF inter-club competitions: Stagnated football development makes minnows of Nigerian clubs

In the last six seasons, Nigerian clubs have found it difficult to go beyond the second round in CAF inter-club competitions. Amid this poor continental showing, CHRISTIAN OKPARA writes that getting Nigerian clubs to championship-winning level requires a lot more than what is on the ground, which includes poor planning continental competitions, a dearth of gaffers with sound tactical and technical abilities, and the failure to align the domestic calendar with international football calendar.

Nigerian football is a contradiction. At the national team level, the country has players that compete favourably against their peers in Africa and beyond, with its stars almost always in contention for Africa’s best players’ awards.

Nigeria has won the African Footballer of the Year crown back-to-back in the last two years, with Victor Osimhen taking the title in 2023, and Ademola Lookman retaining it last year.

But at the club level, Nigerian clubs are hardly reckoned with nowadays. This is because since Heartland Football Club of Owerri and Kano Pillars played in the semifinals of the CAF Champions League in 2009, no Nigerian club has gone as far as the last four in Africa’s top inter-club competition.

Worse still, the country’s candidates have failed to go beyond the quarterfinals of the second-tier CAF Confederation Cup, a competition that no Nigerian club has won since the African body merged the Cup Winners Cup with the CAF Cup in 2004.

The situation has not always been this bad. The fact is, in the 1970s up to the early 2000s, Nigerian clubs were among the strongest teams in Africa, with the country’s league ranked among the best five in the continent.

At various times iconic clubs like Enugu Rangers, IICC Shooting Stars, Bendel Insurance, and Enyimba Football Club of Aba were African champions.

Enyimba hold the record as the first and only Nigerian side to have won the CAF Champions League when the Peoples Elephant won the crown back-to-back in the 2003 and 2004 seasons.

There was a time in the country’s football history when the senior national team was made up of players sourced 100 percent from the local league. And even when players from foreign clubs came to play for the country in the 1970s up until the early 1990s, they had to fight hard to earn their positions in the team because of the calibre of stars that the Nigerian league supplied to the national team. That was a time when Nigerian clubs were always at the business end of CAF inter-club competitions.

So what has gone wrong?
This season, Nigeria entered four clubs- Rangers Football Club of Enugu, Remo Stars Football Club of Ikenne, Enyimba Football Club of Aba, and El Kanemi Warriors of Maiduguri into the CAF Champions League, and the Confederation Cup respectively. But after the first round of both competitions, Remo Stars (Champions League) and El-Kanemi (Confederation Cup) were sent packing. Enugu Rangers soon followed suit in the second round of the Champions League when they lost to Angola’s Sagrada Esperança. That ouster left Enyimba as the country’s sole campaigner in the continent.

However, Enyimba were eliminated from the CAF Confederation in the group stage following their poor performance in Group D of the competition.

The Peoples Elephant managed a 1-1 draw with Egypt’s Al Masry in their fifth game of the group stage and needed a miracle in Cairo, on January 19 against another Egyptian club, Zamalek, to make the last eight of the competition. But they lost the game 1-3 to the Egyptians.

In contrast to the Nigerian situation, North African, South African, and East African clubs have in recent years been dominant forces in CAF competitions.

Apart from record-African champions, Al Ahly of Egypt and perennial contenders, Esperance and Etoile du Sahel of Tunisia, Morocco’s Raja Casablanca, Wydad and FAR Rabat, TP Mazembe of DR Congo, and South Africa’s Mamelodi Sundowns, Kaiser Chiefs and Orlando Pirates, such smaller football playing nations like Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Libya, and Rwanda have joined nations that produce teams that compete up to the last stages of continental competitions.

With the performance of Nigerian teams this season, there are fears that CAF may prune down Nigerian flag bearers in its competitions to two. That will mean that only the league winner and the President Federation Cup champions would be allowed into the competitions if at the end of the season, the country’s rating falls below the other countries in its category.

Nigeria is currently rated so low that when CAF was asked to nominate four clubs for the inaugural FIFA Club World Cup billed to debut in the United States this year, the African football governing body did not see any Nigerian club fit for the 32-team competition. Instead, the body chose three teams from North Africa and one from South Africa to fly the continent’s flag.

According to a former international goalkeeper, Segun Oguns, the situation, will remain dire until the country finds a way of moving with the times in terms of football development.

He said that the nation’s football has stagnated such that countries formerly seen as minnows have moved way above Nigeria in football development.

“I saw a couple of games in the league when I returned to the country recently and I can say that our major problem is that football has moved away from us. Football has become a global thing now, and for the country to move with the times, the coaches and administrators must also join in the current trends. Talent is not enough anymore.

We are still doing what we did in the 1970s; we just keep passing the ball without direction.

“Most of the coaches I see in the league are inexperienced. Apart from inexperience, when you neglect the top coaches because you don’t want to pay the right remuneration, you go for the kindergarten coaches who don’t understand the game.

“I saw a lot of good play, good passing of the ball, but without purpose; without direction. You cannot win anything in the continent without changing the training pattern.”

Oguns said that most Nigerian club coaches lack the tactical, technical, and psychological knowledge needed to turn raw talents into stars capable of raising the standard of the country’s club football.

“I was in the continent with Warri Wolves and Sunshine Stars in the past and I can tell you that if you want to go as far as the semifinals and finals, you have to change your mode of training. Your approach must be different because playing in the continent is different from playing in our league.”

Oguns also blamed poor planning for Nigerian clubs’ woes in African competitions. He said that most Nigerian clubs go into continental competitions blindly, adding that they hardly study their opponents before entering the field.

“This is where the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) must come in. The federation wants to be measured by the performance of the national team, but they are the custodians of football in Nigeria.

“The NFF should be responsible for ensuring that the Nigerian league is growing. We should not measure the federation by the performance of the national team alone. It is responsible for the growth of the game from the U-17, U-20, and U-23 levels to the men’s and women’s leagues.

“If the federation grows the Nigerian league, it will become easy for the national teams to get quality players from the league instead of this practice of running to Europe to look for players of Nigerian descent rejected by other countries.”

Echoing Oguns’ submission, an official of the NPFL, who pleaded anonymity, said that the NFF must find a way of getting Nigerian coaches up to international standard to halt the “steady slide in our football.”

A former Stationery Stores of Lagos midfielder, Loveday Omoruyi, blamed the country’s lip service to grassroots development for the clubs’ woes in African football, saying that there must be a deliberate programme to unearth talented players from schools and the streets, who will then be nurtured to play for the clubs.

He said: “Most of the players in my days were discovered while they were in secondary schools. I played for Stationery Stores in the African Cup Winners’ Cup final here in Lagos while I was still in school. Tarila Okorowanta was also a student then. But these days, they believe that you must be up to 30 years old to play in the Champions League.”

Buttressing his point with Barcelona’s Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams of Atletico Bilboa, Omoruyi said that Spain has shown that football belongs to the youth.

He added: “Until Nigeria goes back to the grassroots, discovers players, and develops them to play at the highest level of the game, we will not get anywhere.

“Nigerian clubs must have proper junior teams as it is done all over the world. What we have here are junior teams that contribute nothing to the main sides every year.  The managers of the league must ensure that every team maintains an effective junior side that serves as a nursery for the main team. If not, we will continue to recycle players that have outlived their usefulness.

Speaking after the recent Confederation Cup game between Enyimba and Al Masry of Egypt, at the Akwa Ibom Stadium, Uyo, he regretted that Nigerian clubs have fallen below their peers from other African countries because they lack people with the required tactical and technical ability to guide them.

“Football has grown from what it used to be in the 1990s; now everybody plays total football developed by coaches in different ways. It is no longer the standard 4-4-2 or 4-2-4; it evolves owing to given situations.

“But look at what we just witnessed here. Enyimba managed a draw with Al Masry because player-by-player, the Egyptians are not too fantastic. But while they played total football, hassling Enyimba into making mistakes, our team was still divided into defence, midfield and attack. You saw the Enyimba attackers waiting upfront for the defenders and midfielders to bring the ball to them. There was a total disconnect between the defence and attack, which rendered Enyimba’s attack useless.

“If this game was against Al Ahly or Mamelodi Sundowns, who have better players, Enyimba would have been beaten silly, and Enyimba is our best team now.

“You can imagine why Remo Stars and Rangers always qualify for the continent only to fail at the first challenge. These teams are very poor technically.”

Abubakar Bukola Saraki (ABS) Football Club’s General Manager, Aloy Chukwuemeka, blames the “inconsistencies” in the Nigerian league calendar for the clubs failures in continental championships.

According to Chukwuemeka, who was part of Enyimba’s success stories in the early 2000s, Nigerian clubs will continue to fail in the continent as long as the Nigerian Professional Football League’s (NPFL) calendar is not in sync with CAF and FIFA calendars.

He said that the country’s teams keep falling in the first round of CAF competitions because they are not always ready for the games when they begin.

Chukwuemeka said: “Over the years the Nigerian football calendar has been at a crossroads with that of CAF and FIFA. Our domestic topflight league, most times, commences late and ends late, thereby not aligning with the international football calendar.

“Other countries finish their leagues earlier, submit their representatives, and commence their leagues while also using the league to strengthen their players’ participation in continental championships.

“So for Nigerian clubs to do well in continental championships, we must align our calendars with international football calendar.”

He also blamed Nigeria’s failure in CAF competitions the constant exodus of players to other countries at the end of every season.

He said: “Most of our good players, especially highest goal scorers, always move abroad and abandon their clubs midway into continental championships and some of the clubs fail to recruit quality players to replace the departed ones.

“I was part of the Enyimba FC backroom staff when the club won the CAF Champions League back-to-back in 2003 and 2004.  What Enyimba did then was to recruit the best legs in the league, and give them long-term lucrative contracts to stop them from leaving the club midway into the season. That was the secret.

“So, if we must get our clubs into the championship-winning level, the NFF should ensure that clubs give long-term contacts with good incentives to players to discourage them from running to obscure leagues, where the teams pay better than Nigerian clubs.

“Clubs participating in continental championships should also be granted the liberty to pick exceptional players from other clubs in the league to fortify their squads for international competitions under a special arrangement.”

A former Enyimba striker, Emeka Nwanna, whose goals helped the Peoples Elephant to their two CAF Champions League titles in 2003 and 2004, blames the mentality of the current players’ for the clubs’ poor performance in international championships.

Nwanna, now a member of the Enyimba governing board, said that most of the current players are not committed to their trade such that they easily give up when it seems that the odds are stacked against them.

“Most of the players these days do not have the mentality to go the extra mile when the chips are down,” he said while dismissing the claim that Nigerian clubs are playing badly in the continent because most good league players are abandoning their clubs for European teams regularly.

Nwanna said that even during his time, players still moved to Europe in droves, adding that the difference is that they had battle-hardened stars determined to achieve success while still playing in the local league.

“Playing on the continent was enough motivation for us to go and fight for success. I could remember our game against Petro Atletico of Angola, who held us to a 1-1 draw in Aba and we went to Luanda to beat them 2-1.

“We did not depend on the coaches. Before the game against Petro Atletico, our captain, Obinna Nwaneri, and Ugah Okpara called me aside to promise me $100 if I scored to beat the Angolans.

“We don’t see such commitment anymore in current players. They move from one club to another in search of more money instead of developing their game. If the players understand that when they do well in the continent, it will open doors for better contracts in Europe, instead of the obscure leagues that their agents take them to, they will sit down and work towards improving their games. This will in turn lead to better performance in CAF competitions.”