Nigerians suffered gratuitous embarrassment from the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) on Tuesday as Paul Le Guen, the foreign coach it announced a day before as the new Technical Adviser of the senior national team – The Super Eagles – declined the offer. Le Guen hinged his rejection of the appointment on the fact that some of his demands had not been met.
The football administration body, in an apparent face-saving measure that same Tuesday, conveyed an emergency meeting of its Executive Committee to tell Nigerians that the deal was off. It cited as its own reasons the fact that Le Guen was not ready to live in the country. It also said the coach resisted being given targets (such as finishing in the Final 8 of the 2018 World Cup).
One point that is clear from this unfortunate development is that the Technical and Development Committee of the NFF, which has the responsibility to select coaches for the national teams, either did not conduct a proper interview in this case or someone is trying to be clever by half.
We say this because a proper interview of Le Guen (even by Skype, as was advertised) would have showed that he would not go back on his demands. Even then, the NFF ought to have confirmed his readiness to accept the job just before naming him as Technical Adviser for the Super Eagles on Monday.
Le Guen, who played for some high-profile clubs including Paris Saint Germaine (PSG) and won 17 caps for his country (France) before starting a coaching career which has seen him at Rennes, Lyon, PSG (France) and Glasgow Rangers (Scotland), could not be expected to be easily brow-beaten into taking any job — even the Super Eagles job– no matter how attractive it appears.
The NFF and its technical committee probably felt that the Nigerian job was a hot cake that could not be rejected by any coach and got its hands bitten for that naivety. The country has now been embarrassed as the excuses given for the botched deal smack of an afterthought devised to save the face of our football administrators. We are not at all amused. The NFF has given its technical committee one week within which to find another foreign Technical Adviser for the Super Eagles, while ratifying all the other appointments: Salisu Yusuf (Chief Coach), Imama Amapakabo (Assistant Coach), Alloy Agu (Goalkeeper Trainer), Nduka Ugbade (restored to the U-17 team as Assistant Coach) and Bitrus Bewerang, (new NFF Technical Director).
Nigeria’s merry-go-round in search of a foreign coach has serious implications for the training of our national team. Faced with the present embarrassment of a back-to-back failure to qualify for the African Nations Cup, we cannot afford to toy with our chances of qualifying for the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
Unfortunately, the signs are ominous already. Apart from being grouped alongside Algeria, Cameroun and Zambia in a difficult contest which will see only one team qualify, we are far from settling the matter of our coaching crew, let alone determining the training programme and tactics for our World Cup qualification matches starting away with Zambia on October 3, which is just about two months away.
It is this kind of lacklustre approach to football administration in the country that has seen our fortunes plummet from an all-time high of Number 5 in the world in 1994 to our present No 70, and 14 in Africa, in the FIFA ranking.
Our football administrators have always had a predilection for foreign coaches, but they sorely lack the capacity to engage and manage them. This faux pas has happened too many times to the embarrassment of the whole country.
We think that our governments, including the current President Muhammadu Buhari administration, ought to put their foot down on their reservations about foreign coaches . Do we really need one now? Can we truly afford one, especially at this time of serious economic downturn? These are the questions that the NFF needs to answer quickly and patriotically to save the nation further embarrassment now and in the future.
