Let me start with a confession. I am not an ardent follower of the football game at the moment. But I was not born soccer blind either. I was once a great lover of football. I even played football in the early years of my life, in the primary school.

Football fascinated me a lot in those days and I followed national and international soccer tournaments as much as I could, relying solely on commentaries ran on radio by the icons of the sport at that time, the likes of Ernest Okonkwo, Ishola Folorunsho and Tolu Fatoyinbo. At that time, football was more on radio in this part of the world than on television. I knew all the names of the local and international stars who defined and dominated the tempo of world soccer. I am talking of people like the legendary Edson Arantes de Nascimento, who became better known as Pele, and Santos Garrincha. Both of them are former Brazilian soccer idols. I also knew such big African soccer names like Teslim Balogun, the Nigerian wonder kid whose shots were like thunderstorm and sometimes tore through the nets. He actually became popularly known as Thunder Balogun. And then the more recent one - Roger Milla - the greatest Cameroonian footballer to date. They all played football for the love of the game, the feeling of self-fulfillment it offered and the  honour it brought for their countries. 

 That was before the era of money football, before football became big business and started bringing for players, the very successful ones, a lot of fame and fortune. Before then, football was the favourite pastime of a few young people, a game of the idle and for the idle, those who had nothing more profitable to do. They were the ones who played football and they received little or no encouragement from their parents and the government.

Today, football is all about money. Money rather than the love of the game is now the reason why many people play soccer. Footballers, and again the very skilful ones, have become like any other commodity of trade, marketed and sold to those in need of them. Football has become a huge attraction for the young people, male and female, and those of them who are able to kick the round leather object with some reasonable degree of skill always rush to the highly lucrative soccer markets in Europe to be listed and given price tags.

Money has positively affected football. But it has done a lot of damage to it too, especially here in Nigeria where money and what it can buy have taken the place of God in the hearts of most people. Money, the other side of the Nigerian corruption coin has become a big problem for Nigerian football. It is partly the reason why our soccer stars excel in their foreign clubs which offer huge pay packages but become dummies back in the national team where service to the country takes precedence over monetary reward.

This evil coin is the reason for most of the humiliating soccer defeats that our teams have suffered in the past and the general decline in our football. It is also the reason why millions of football-loving Nigerians, including yours sincerely, have lost or are fast losing interest in the game. It is the reason why many Nigerians would rather follow club football in Europe than our own premier league which has today, become one huge joke.

Money and the craze for more money is the reason why we have no world class sport facilities in this country. How many stadiums of international standard do we have in this country? Perhaps, two – the Abuja national stadium and the Teslim Balogun Stadium owned by the Lagos State government. And that is in Nigeria, Africa’s richest and most populous nation. New sport facilities are not being developed. Existing ones have been left to rot away. The National Stadium in Lagos is a classic example of our neglect of football. Every year, we budget huge sums of money for sport development but the funds are usually ambushed and shared by sport administrators. How can we expect our football to grow and our players to compete favourably with those of other countries when we have  no facilities to support the game?

President Goodluck Jonathan was unable to conceal his anger and embarrassment over the very poor performance of the Super Eagles in South Africa and almost committed a blunder that would have done a lot more harm to our football. He announced the withdrawal of Nigeria from all international football competitions for two years soon after our team crashed out of the 2010 World Cup but later rescinded the decision to avoid the bigger FIFA hammer from being let loose. Millions of soccer-loving Nigerians share his pain and anger but that dismal outing of the Super Eagles in South Africa, if truth must be told, is our collective guilt. We got the result we deserved. The Super Eagles we sent to South Africa were not so super, they were not prepared. They were not even as good as super chickens.

But their failure in South Africa is not my own real source of pain. Rather, it is the fact that South Africa and not Nigeria  got the first ever opportunity given to our continent to host the World Cup. That hurts our pride as a nation far more than the inability of our team to go beyond the group stage of the competition. That was also our biggest loss, not the defeats we suffered to the far more superior soccer boots of Argentina and Greece. And I am surprised that we are not even talking about this loss to South Africa and how we can avoid it in other areas in future. It shows how unserious we are as a nation and how comfortable we are playing second fiddle to smaller and poorer nations. This attitude must change if we want to get to where South Africa is today in the comity of nations. We don’t have to win the World Cup to get there. But we must earn the respect of the rest of world.

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