What is Nigeria's footballing identity? [Excerpt]

On Friday, November 19, 2021, Oscar Washington Tabarez was sacked as manager of the Uruguay national team after more than 15 years.

He had, to that point, been in the post for over 200 games – if you take into account his previous two-year spell in the late 1980s – winning one Copa America in 2011. If that seems like a rather sparse honours sheet, it is because of modern football’s obsession with the concept of the “senior winner”, where ultimate worth is determined by titles collected like infinity stones and used to snap all criticism and dissent into oblivion. It is also partly my fault: to understand what exactly Tabarez represented, the sheer size of his footprint on Uruguayan football is to realise that not even the term “manager” did him justice.

By instituting the ‘Proceso’ – an all-encompassing framework for the revolution of the country’s football – the former primary school teacher completely altered the course of football in Uruguay, co-opting the ‘garra charrua’ ideology from its brutish origins toward something positive and aspirational. “We came up with a project to institutionalise the entire organisation of Uruguayan football and the training of all football players,” he explained.

He was not only the coach of the senior national side but the overseer of all its teams at all levels; more accurately the technical director.

His framework was not necessarily of a tactical nature, more a cultural one. In terms of style, Tabarez fell on the catch-as-catch-can side of things, as happy springing forward on the counter as taking the initiative himself, and flitted between different systems, sometimes even within the same match. What he wanted to do, and what he did, was to win hearts and minds; in doing this, he also won matches. Lots of them.

Over the course of the past three weeks, the job security of interim Super Eagles coach Austin Eguavoen swung from ironclad to non-existent to complicated.

With the World Cup qualifying playoff on the horizon, naturally, the discussion has already progressed to what the reconstitution of the coaching crew means and how it might play out in practice. While I have a few broad ideas, I feel like this critical juncture is a good fork in the road to have a think about what exactly Nigerian football even is about.

This is particularly relevant because the biggest criticism of former coach Gernot Rohr has revolved around playing style. Broadly speaking, the 68-year-old won the matches he had to, qualifying Nigeria for every international tournament going in his time in charge (a fact he has been only too happy to remind everyone of through his media proxies), and he at least made a respectable fist of competing at the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations (the less said about the 2018 World Cup, the better). In spite of these, the opinion of him up until the point of sacking was mixed to negative.

It is not because, as some like to imagine – and some say outright – Nigerians are incapable of recognizing a good thing when they see it. It is because the reception of even an objectively good thing can depend on the manner in which it is given or achieved. 

To use qualification as a wand to ward off criticism rang a little contradictory when the very reason Rohr was appointed was precisely that failing to qualify for the 2015 and 2017 editions of the AFCON was considered an underperformance. In other words, those two outcomes were viewed as anomalous in light of Nigeria’s standing and available quality, not a confirmation of minnow status.

This is a slight tangent, but it is an important one in understanding why Rohr got short shrift from many, and also in explaining why it was never going to be enough to simply return Nigeria to the position of serial tournament qualifiers.

However, where the criticism of the German fell down a bit was in its lack of clarity. If the desire was to dominate opponents and score lots of goals, in what way was that aim to be pursued? If it was to entertain while keeping a winning ethos, by what framework could that be achieved? If it was to “play good football”, what does this mean within the context of Nigerian football?

________________________________________________________________________________________________

You can subscribe to the Chaos Digest newsletter to receive future posts directly via email.