Nigerian Sport: The Rot Is No Longer On The Field Alone

Something is badly wrong with Nigerian sport, and the country should stop pretending that another change of coach will cure it.

The problem has travelled beyond the playing field. It sits in the offices where appointments are made, in the structures through which federations are governed, in the handling of money, in the treatment of athletes and in the curious durability of officials whose tenure seems capable of surviving results that would have ended the careers of the people they supervise.

Nigeria still has talent. That is perhaps what makes the situation more infuriating.

The country continues to produce footballers capable of playing at the highest levels abroad. The Super Falcons remain a formidable African force. Individual athletes continue to emerge despite the inadequacies surrounding them. What is missing is an administrative environment capable of converting that talent into a dependable national sporting system.

The appointment of Mainasara Illo to head the Nigeria Anti Doping Centre is an appropriate place to begin because it exposes the country’s casual attitude towards professional specialisation.

Nigeria did not wake up yesterday to the problem of doping. It spent years developing a national framework and eventually enacted the Nigeria Anti Doping Act 2025. The law created the Nigerian Anti Doping Centre and specified the requirements for the Executive Secretary.

President Bola Tinubu subsequently nominated Illo for the position and the Senate confirmed him. The official justification for the nomination was made under Section 15 of the Act.

The difficulty is that the appointment itself generated questions about whether Illo’s professional background corresponds with the specialised requirements of the office.

I raised that concern before his confirmation.

It remains a legitimate concern.

Anti doping is not sports publicity. It involves scientific testing, prohibited substances, laboratory procedures, athlete education, investigation and international compliance. A wrong decision can damage an athlete’s career and expose the country to international embarrassment.

Nigeria therefore has no business treating the professional requirement for such an office as a decorative provision in legislation.

If the appointee satisfies the law, the government should have no difficulty demonstrating how. If he does not, the country has a problem that cannot be concealed by Senate confirmation.

And Senate confirmation does not magically alter the qualifications written into an Act.

This is where Shehu Dikko’s responsibility also comes under examination. As Chairman of the National Sports Commission, he occupies one of the most influential positions in the present sports structure and was closely associated with Illo’s emergence. The question is not whether Dikko has the right to support an appointment. He does. The question is whether the new sports architecture is genuinely being built around expertise or whether political and personal calculations continue to determine who occupies specialised offices.

The National Institute for Sports presents a similar test.

Philip Shaibu arrived from Edo State to head an institution that is supposed to supply Nigerian sport with trained human capacity. Its responsibility includes the development of coaches, athletes and specialised sporting personnel.

That is why the allegation that personnel from Edo were brought into the institute deserves proper scrutiny. I will not turn an allegation into a fact without the personnel records. Those records should tell the story plainly. Who was appointed? What job did each person receive? What qualifications did they possess? Who occupied the position before them?

There should be no difficulty producing the evidence.

If the records justify the appointments, the matter ends there. If they reveal that professional positions were distributed for reasons unrelated to competence, then the NIS has been diverted from the purpose for which it exists.

A country that wants world class sport cannot build its sporting institutions on anything less than professional competence.

Then there is the NFF.

Here the excuses are becoming exhausted.

Mohammed Sanusi has been General Secretary since 2015 and was reappointed in 2024 for another three years. FIFA congratulated him on his reappointment and described his role as essential to the governance and long term success of the federation.

That longevity should ordinarily have produced an institution with deep administrative memory and measurable progress.

Instead, Nigerian football is preparing another leadership election after two consecutive World Cup failures.

Nigeria did not qualify for Qatar 2022. It did not qualify for the expanded 2026 World Cup either, despite Africa having ten representatives at the tournament.

The Olympic football team missed Paris 2024. The Golden Eaglets have suffered repeated qualification failures. The domestic game remains too weak to provide the dependable foundation expected of a country with Nigeria’s football history.

Against that background, the campaign slogan for the coming NFF election is “Continuity 2026.”

Continuity?

That word deserves to be examined rather than applauded.

What exactly is to continue?

The World Cup absences?

The decline of the youth teams? The weakness of the domestic league? The same voting structure?

The same concentration of electoral influence?

The same officials?

Patrick Omorodion has already challenged the slogan, asking what achievements justify another term for the Gusau administration. His criticism points to the absence of a convincing programme that has transformed Nigerian football during the present tenure.

The criticism is not coming from one disgruntled voice.

Odegbami has been far more direct. After Nigeria’s latest World Cup failure, he demanded a complete overhaul and said the NFF board should leave. He has gone beyond personalities and attacked the constitutional arrangement through which the federation is governed, arguing that the present system gives disproportionate electoral power to state football association chairmen and shuts out important football constituencies. He has indicated that he is prepared to challenge that structure in court.

This is perhaps the most important part of the present NFF controversy.

The argument is no longer simply whether Ibrahim Gusau should remain president.

It is whether the mechanism through which Nigerian football chooses its leadership is itself defective.

That question cannot be buried under the usual warning about government interference.

A federation does not become untouchable merely because FIFA exists. Nigeria is entitled to determine how a national sporting institution operates within Nigerian law, provided the arrangement remains compatible with the legitimate rules of international football.

Odegbami’s position is particularly significant because he has not confined his criticism to the personalities occupying the offices. He has challenged the architecture.

That is where serious reform begins.

A bad system can produce a succession of bad outcomes without requiring every individual within it to be personally corrupt.

The system itself may be the problem.

Then there is the uncomfortable history surrounding player selection.

Clemens Westerhof alleged in 2012 that some players had paid about $15,000 to secure national team selection. He did not name the players or officials involved and did not identify the period in which the alleged transactions occurred.

Taribo West later described what he called a cash and carry culture around national team selection and alleged that players had been pressured to pay or provide expensive gifts.

Those allegations cannot be presented as convictions.

But Nigeria eventually had a documented case that went much further than rumour.

Salisu Yusuf was filmed accepting cash from men posing as football agents who wanted two players selected for a continental championship. He denied wrongdoing, but the NFF investigated the matter and eventually banned him for a year and fined him $5,000.

That episode should have been treated as an institutional warning.

Instead, the broader question of how much influence money and connections have over access to national teams continues to haunt Nigerian football.

A national shirt should not be something an ambitious player has to negotiate for through agents and inducements.

The Super Falcons have supplied another troubling illustration of administrative dysfunction.

Their disputes with the NFF over allowances, salaries and preparation have repeatedly spilled into public view. Before the 2023 Women’s World Cup, coach Randy Waldrum said he had been owed 14 months’ salary, with seven months subsequently paid, while some players were still owed money dating back two years.

Waldrum also publicly demanded an explanation for a $960,000 FIFA grant he said had been provided to prepare participating countries for the tournament. The NFF disputed his accusations. The allegation therefore remains an allegation, not a finding of financial misconduct.

But there is something the argument cannot conceal.

The Falcons were preparing for a World Cup while the federation and its coach were fighting publicly over money and preparation.

That is an administrative disgrace.

The women had already earned their place on the world stage. Their job was to prepare and compete. They should not have had to spend valuable energy fighting the institution responsible for supporting them.

This is where the entire story begins to converge.

The anti doping appointment raises the question of professional competence.

The NIS raises the question of whether sporting expertise is being protected from patronage.

The NFF raises the question of whether a governing structure can preserve itself despite poor outcomes.

The selection controversies raise questions about the integrity of access to national teams.

The Falcons’ repeated disputes expose the consequences when administrators lose sight of the people for whom the institution exists.

These are not unrelated quarrels.

They point towards a sports system in which the administration has acquired a life of its own.

That is the real danger.

An institution can remain busy while achieving very little. Meetings continue. Elections are held. Officials issue statements. Committees sit. Budgets are announced. Programmes are launched.

Then the national team misses the World Cup.

And the system moves on. The consequence is rarely distributed evenly.

The player who misses selection may lose the opportunity of a career. The coach may lose his job. An athlete may spend years preparing for a competition only to find that basic administrative arrangements have not been made. The official who presided over the structure can remain firmly in place and prepare for another election.

That imbalance is no longer defensible.

The Senate’s scrutiny of the sports administration should therefore be welcomed, not resisted. The handling of public resources and the performance of institutions established to serve the country are legitimate matters for public accountability.

The NFF election should consequently be treated as more than a contest for another four years of office.

The electorate should be asking what kind of football administration Nigeria wants and whether the present constitutional arrangement is capable of producing it.

A country that has produced some of Africa’s finest footballers should not have to plead for competence from the people managing its football.

The administrators have enjoyed the authority.

They should now accept the responsibility that comes with it.

Nigeria’s sporting talent is not the problem. The country has demonstrated that repeatedly.

The deeper problem is what happens to that talent when it enters a system where professional standards can be questioned, selection can be surrounded by suspicion, athletes can become entangled in financial disputes and leadership can present continuity as though survival itself were evidence of achievement.

That is not development.

It is institutional self preservation.

And Nigerian sport has had enough of it.