Mabo worried by NFF’s insistence on foreign coaches for Super Falcons

Super Falcons’ former coach, Ismaila Mabo, is worried by the Nigeria Football Federation’s (NFF) desire to hire a foreign coach for the senior women national team. The coach, who led the team to several battles, including the FIFA Women World Cup and the African Nations Cup, believes that indigenous coaches have the quality needed to manage the side successfully.

Arguing that the various foreign coaches that have handled the Super Falcons have not added anything special to the team, Mabo said nothing has changed since an expatriate took charge of the team to the last Women World Cup in France.

NFF President, Amaju Pinnick, has on several occasions disclosed that another expatriate would be employed to replace Swede, Thomas Dennerby, who left the Super Falcons for India shortly before the botched Tokyo Olympics qualifiers.

But Mabo believes that rather going for another foreign coach, the federation should bring together a consortium of two or three coaches from the women clubs in the country to manage the team.

“As far as I am concerned, my stance still remains that I do not support the idea of the NFF employing an expatriate to coach our women national team. I think the NFF should look inward and save us unnecessary wastage that occurs when we hire a foreigner to coach our women.

“It is my belief that some of the coaches handling the women football clubs in our league can deliver a good set of players for the national team, just like I and some others did during our days at the national team.

“Certainly, I do not think we can make any headway in women football with an expatriate in charge.” He added: “I watched our matches at the last Women World Cup in France, and I will tell you that nothing has changed because I saw so many wrongs in the team. If we are to go into comparison with what we did back then, I think the indigenous coaches did a lot better than what I saw at the last World Cup in France.

“During our days, we never lost sleep each time we played with any of our African counterparts. Be it Cameroun, Ghana, South Africa and even Cote d’Ivoire that denied us passage to the football event at the next Olympics. Cote d’Ivoire stopping us from going to the Olympics is rather unfortunate.

“Now, under the so-called expatriate coaches, the countries that we used to beat have suddenly become threats to our ambition of qualifying for major tournaments. It is also sad to note that these African countries are still being handled by their indigenous coaches.”