Why Nigeria No Longer Has Players At The Best Teams In The World
Former Tanzania national team coach, Emmanuel Amunike has attributed Nigerian’ absence at the best teams in the world to time and development methods, Bestchoicesports.com.ng understands
Amunike was part of what many called the golden generation Nigerian football. The former attacker played his football for none other than FC Barcelona while his Super Eagles teammates played for sides such as Arsenal (Nwankwo Kanu), Inter & AC Milan (Taribo West) and Juventus (Sunday Oliseh).
“Is not that we don’t have players that can play for Barcelona is just that generation changes and when you look at Nigeria football history in the 90s, Amunike told Brila.
“We have struggled to raise great quality players from the 94′ World cup & AFCON, 96′ Olympics and the last generation at the 98’world cup after that we had a gap between our national team.”
Amunike nevertheless sees a couple highly promising youngsters. He believes that the duo of Samuel Chukwueze and Victor Osimhen will soon be calling some of the top sides in Europe their very own clubs.
“I think we’ve good players now with Samuel Chukwueze in Villarreal and Victor Osimhen in Lille are doing well with big clubs interested this means we are in the right direction and hopes are high that the national team will bounce back to what it used to be.”
“Football changes but it depends on our capacity because a nation that does not develop his youth is a waste nation, so we can’t hope to win the world cup without developing our youth players because this is where we can get the replacement of the present Eagles squad when they can’t serve us anymore.”
“I hope to see a Nigerian playing at top level and believe in the near future we will have players that Liverpool, Madrid, Manchester will be interested in this will help boost the confidence of younger players,” Amunike concluded.