₦airaland Forum

Papi85:
Watched him as a kid at the US 94 World Cup. Typical definition of a disciplined Italian CB. Not the biggest physique wise but was too good and among the greatest to ever play the game in his position

May his soul rest in peace, Amen!!

I read that he got injured in the first match of USA 94. Had knee surgery. Came back 25 days later and absolutely shut down the marauding Brazilian attack of Romario and Bebeto.

Great, great man

I didn't watch Franco Baresi but I've been reading stories and watching clips of him.

He was a great player and a great man. Quiet, strong, brave.

Maradonna, Romario Indeed a host of other great players of the 80's and 90s said he was the greatest defender they ever played against.


Our Benjamin should watch Baresi and model his game on how Baresi played cos I see that Benjamin has that Rolls Royce quality that Baresi had.

RIP Franco Baresi.

Na Una play ball. Rest well

EElopa:
I have deep seated hate for these turkish clubs. They are out to ruin our football. They are after every fucking Nigerian player. Fucking hate that league and clubs with passion. I am just in the process of buying Tolu Ajax and supereargles jersey for giving trabzonspor middle finger when they came for him. For that single act alone I have become a massive Tolu Arokodare fan.

Tolu Arokodare na kpeff jare. Had so much hope in that guy. Baba just zuzu during continental playoffs

TheSuperNerd:
It was not due to Oshoala. She is a legend and I love her but please give Uchenna Kanu her flowers. She was the game changer. Not Oshoala.

And Oshoala should not be starting pls. Not when we have Kanu, Monday, Omewa, Okoronkwo, Ijamilusi, all younger and faster.

Oshoala has turned to our own Ronaldo. Her legs are gone

TheSuperNerd:
I actually have a good laugh anytime that little boy's video is played.. "Our Keeper" especially because it is so apt for part of what happened yesterday. 😂

But you see, Chiamaka Nnadozie is a player that almost never gets criticised because she has been super consistent for us and even at her clubs. So great is her consistency that she is indeed still regarded as the Best GK in Africa and correctly so too.

Yesterday was just a rare bad day for her. I cannot even remember the last time Nnadozie was ever this bad in goal for us. But then she will bounce back. She is still Africa's best and will correct the flaws, I trust.

Indeed, even the best of the best can have a bad day in the office but it does not diminish their class. It is well.

She looked heavy

BankyGee:
🇳🇱🎙️ AFC Ajax's head coach, Jordi Cruijff speaking about Tolu Arokodare 🇳🇬:

Person wey no fit head Ball

Normal strategy. Use the 'weak poor oppressed' nations against the 'strong, rich, oppressor' nations. Marxists playbook strategy.

You guys seen this news? Thing is that the FIFA president will play off the other confederations against UEFA and those ones always come with the sense of 'oppressed Vs oppressor' mentality and will let FIFA have it's way.

European nations will discuss potentially boycotting the World Cup if Gianni Infantino pushes ahead with plans to sell off part of FIFA to private investors. 🚨 pic.twitter.com/9uK8E56PhF

— Sky Sports News (@SkySportsNews) July 28, 2026

maidaboi:
ask yourself

how many of such players did we see at the just concluded world cup?

modern football has fade them away

all we care now is results, nobody wants to be entertained again

you can dribble from earth to moon and nobody will care if you are not scoring or providing assist

Gaurdiola has killed them off.

No where is this tragedy writ large than Brazilian football. They just can't cope. They have become like Malawi. They can't produce Ronaldinho, Zico kind of players. It's really sad.

Brazil will not win the world cup again. They won't. I say this because that way of playing is so ingrained in them. Truth is that samba is a way of life, a sweeping culture which expressed itself through football as one of its mode of expression.

Yes Brazil moved away from pure samba after the loss in 82 but that was not a total abandonment of the essentials of samba - flair, rhythm, skillful movement with the ball. They only toned it down and added more pragmatism to it.

But now football has moved away totally with this emphasis on positional play, low block and rigid tactical discipline. This caught Brazil off guard and now Brazil is suffering from a deep identity crisis.

Even if you have a Ronaldinho, positional play and low block will render him useless because such players need you to move so that they can dribble you and create space. Such players have been rendered redundant. For instance tango is a dance in which two people tangle together. Okay you are a good tango dancer but nobody comes and gets tangled with you in the dance. No matter how skilled you are, your skill has been rendered irrelevant.

Now na Rodri be the kind players wey dey thrive in modern football. Stand - in -the- middle -of -pitch- kind- of players and be spraying passes like sprinkler in the middle of a garden.

That kind of deadness is alien to samba. Samba is still alive in music, in art, in the throbbing vivacity of Brazilian urban culture but as far as football is concerned - it is dead. It has become anachronistic. Unfit for the times. I pity Brazil.

Gaurdiola is a plague. He brought the architectural style called brutalism - functional, cold, dead, ugly - into football. May tiki taka perish!

Papi85:
the same Keshi that invited an unattached player from the local scene for the qualifiers against Chad Abi Niger and handed the player the reverend number 10 shirt in kaduna 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I think that was his last game as coach of the super eagles

Have you asked yourself how Uche Nwafor who was struggling to get game time at vv venlo then and featured mostly for the clubs U21 side made the World Cup team ahead of Martins who was flying with levante in Spain then, Imoh Ezekiel who was banging in goals for fun at Belgium in the colors of standard liege and Ikechukwu Uche who also was doing well in laliga

Same goes to Uchebo (flavor na abania) who didn’t get to 8 goals that season for lowly rated Cecile Brugge in the Belgian league but made the World Cup team. The same league a young imoh Ezekiel was destroying in the colors of standard liege but wasn’t deemed good enough



Oshaniwa made it to the World Cup ahead of Taiwo who was doing pretty well with dynamo kiev

Ruben Gabriel made it to the same World Cup ahead of Haruna Lukman who was doing well for dynamo kieve and Ajagun who was a regular with Greek giants panathiniakos

Do you know that if not for top men in Nigerian football house Keshi almost dropped Yobo and odemwingie for that World Cup?


To cap it all after that World Cup all the undeserving players he smuggled to the super eagles their career got stalled and were not heard about till date 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Bros leave matter abeg

Guy forget. You see that Temu okwaraji that Keshi invited with that Michael Babatunde - e no pure. At all, at all

SymphonyRad:
I'm genuinely just watching highlights of James Obiora and he was absolutely mad skillful! how come he never hit any peak of fame like Jay Jay? Damn, the dude looked legit.

Just jay was a sun that blocked many people's star ooo. He was just too mesmerising.

ChrisKels:
Onyeka seems to be a smart dude and he is level headed too. For him to have made it from Benin city amidst the cultism, fraud and all should tell you the quality of human he is. I guess dude is the first player from Benin city since Osaze Odemwingie.

I like Onyeka ehn. I call him Frank the tank as if I'm the one who gave him that name. He works so hard for the team.

TheSuperNerd:
Pele is greater than them all. No nonsense attempt to rewrite history through epistles or faux pas fronts will change it. Pele is Number 1. To deny it is to deny history itself. Finito.

First the rejection then the resistance and struggle and finally surrender. You are on your way 🤣🤣🤣

Papi85:
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

🤣🤣🤣 You know say andsungorrilla no dey hear word.

I for add Ikenna Eneh for am

Goke7:
Ok so he can speak anyhow against someone who’s no longer alive to speak for himself, how wise!

Funny enough if folks like elegbete is given a chance to run our football he will do worse 😂

You see that your last paragraph? That what scares me about Nigeria.

"If I get there, I will, I will. Cho Cho Cho."

Na lie oo. Put that person there you will see signs and wonders.

Wike was chiding FCT area council chairmen who are all gbagyi men that see you people all these years cannot develop your own areas which is your native land. All the inner roads in the suburbs are bad. Terribly bad even the road to the offices of these chairmen.

NasirIbnLaAhad:
‎

‎
‎If you ask me, Edafe actually said some things that needed saying. You see, Nigerians just don't like to hear the truth. Especially when it's presented so plainly as a matter of fact without polishing and soft landings. The only problem here is that he actually mixed up a lot of his claims with so much factual errors that it's now easy for everybody to just wave the whole thing off. Which is annoying, because a) he's mostly correct with his arguments but b) making blatant factual errors also makes him a part of the problem as well, because we should be educating people on the FACTS, not making up nonsense.
‎
‎Okay, for instance, Edafe said FIFA rankings started in 1994 and that the top five spots back then belonged to the five regional champions -- which is hilariously wrong. FIFA rankings actually kicked off in December 1992. And yes, Nigeria did hit 5th in April 1994 after winning AFCON, but the other four teams in that top five were Brazil, Germany, Norway and Switzerland. First, Argentina were the 1993 Copa America defending champions and not Brazil. Secondly, Norway and Switzerland had never won any regional trophy in their lives. They were just in form at the time. I'm surprised no one in that room thought to fact check him on this and it showed that none of them bothered to do their due diligence and make proper research before recording the video.
‎
‎It's these kind of schoolboy gaffes that make people stop listening no matter how strong the spine of your argument is. Once someone catches you fumbling something this easy to check, they start wondering what else you got wrong.
‎
‎Also our 2013 AFCON win was anything but luck. Calling that win luck isn't just wrong, it's disrespectful to Stephen Keshi's memory and to every player who fought for that trophy. I recall nobody gave Nigeria a chance in hell going into that tournament. Keshi built a squad around home-based boys. Home based! Let that sink in. Meanwhile Ivory Coast rolled in with their "golden generation" and were clear favourites, having reached the final just last year in Equatorial Guinea-Gabon. And yet Nigeria beat them 2-1 in the quarters. Keshi himself said the boys showed character, that when he played for Nigeria he had to fight for everything and that's exactly what they did that day. Even Enyeama admitted they weren't the "golden generation" type of talent, but they had a bond most teams would kill for. How is that luck? Edafe is the same person talking about how the biggest teams in the World had a culture during their moments of dominance so how did he miss the fact that Nigeria at the 2013 AFCON had a culture defined by cocunut head, iron teeth, physical, never say die football?

‎These are the blunders that make him sound ridiculous, but like I said earlier, the man wasn't entirely talking nonsense.
‎
‎Point one: Nigerians are arrogant, easily satisfied, and terrible at long-term planning. That's a cold brutal fact and anyone that disagrees is too far up his own arse not to see it. One AFCON win, one decent friendly result against a European side, and suddenly we're acting like world beaters. We have no plan, no building, no structure, nothing at all except vibes. 2026 World Cup qualifiers, we were drawn with Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Benin and South Africa, with nine African slots up for grabs, and we still couldn't secure automatic qualification. A country that made three straight World Cups between '94 and '98 couldn't get through a group with minnows and a war-torn nation in it. We had all the time in the World to get a new coach and draw up a blueprint to not just qualify but compete at the actual tournament and yet we didn't do jack.
‎
‎Point two: our current players are indeed overhyped. I wouldn't go as far as calling them "shit" as Edafe did, that's too harsh. Osimhen, Lookman, Iwobi are genuinely gifted footballers. But we as fans rate them 8s and 9s when on the pitch they're really just 5s and 6s. There's a real gap between how good we think they are and what they actually produce. And the bigger issue in my own opinion, which I will add to Edafe's argument there is: work ethic and mentality.
‎
‎Remember the training boycott right before the World Cup playoff, over unpaid allowances, days before a must-win match? The DR Congo collapse? Nigeria up early, Osimhen goes off injured, and the whole team falls apart and loses on penalties. Once Osimhen left the pitch, that was that. Then there's Troost-Ekong hosting a charity match back home while qualifiers were still live. Lol. And then some people will get their knickers in a twist when these players are rightly called out for their poor decision making?
‎
‎Come on.
‎
‎Anyway, long story short, Edafe might have spewed a few nonsensical statements here and there, but overall, he's not wrong. It's just sad that both him and his staff can't bother to do some actual research so they don't actually come across sounding like they don't know what they're saying.

"spine of your argument"

What a juicy turn of phrase. I hope it's not copyrighted. I've put it in my arsenal.

Your observations are apt.

"Nigerians are arrogant, easily satisfied, and terrible at long-term planning".

This is a big cultural issue oo. We are all in this matrics of incompetence, laziness, aversion to long term planning and complacency.

How do we change it. This is the only way oo. It has to change oo. If not we'd keep going in circles chasing shadows which cast darkness over all our past achievements while nations like Morocco carry the crown as the new king of African football.

AndSunGorilla:
Rubbish list, no Odegbami, Muda Lawal, Christian Chukwu and Ahmed Musa.

When you do your own list put Ikedia as number one and Rabiu Afolabi as number 10 😏😏

forgiveness:
Bhuahahahha! Messi number one? Bhuahahahha!!!!

Dem even put Pele for number 3. Hahahahhahahahahahahahahhahahahahahhahahahahhahahhahahahhahahahahahhahahahahahahahhahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahhahahahah!

Your mouth go don tear for this laugh. Pele should be number kini?

TheSuperNerd:
Lol... A list that is merely a futile attempt to rewrite history. Rubbish list just like any other western/northwestern or mainstream European media-littered list agendarizing Messi as #1 so much in an attempt to brainwash football fanbases. Lol

The fact that Samuel Eto'o fils is missing from a list of 100 further shows the absolute clownery of this entire list.

Pele unbiasedly and undisputably remains The GOAT of GOATs.
Eto'o is undeniably the African GOAT.
Failed history rewrite attempt. They should go back to football history classes.

When we live in history we seldom are aware of the momentousness of the people who make greatness. In time you will come to accept that Messi is the GOAT.

I acknowledge him grudgingly and reluctantly because Maradonna remains my eternal love

Odunayaw:
The sacrilege of Maradona being placed above Pele!

I will put Zidane ahead of Cruyff and Cristiano

Well, well. You right on Zidane

maidaboi:
Ronaldinho will always be my Goat because he made me love football with his skills

My own devotion is to Maradonna. I don't have affinity for Messi, Ronaldo and Pele. Next to Maradonna, I'd pick Zidane, then Ronaldinho, Bergkamp, Okocha.

List don comot oo👇👇

jihday:
or maybe northerners were hardly scouted in the past due to lack of interest in football, all they wanted to do was learn Arabic and take a walk with their cows while the learned ones want to join any of the armed forces or pick up a govt job, things have changed recently and they are beginning to grow a little bit of interest in football. For better understanding Niger republic who share close cultural similarities with them have greatly improved in football, in the last Afcon qualifying they took 4 points off Ghana even beating them at home and in the World Cup qualifying they came second in the group behind Morocco with 15 points, 10-15 years ago that would have been impossible.

Fair point. My statement is based off history. Let's see whether going forward the north will best the south and surpass them. This is what national development should have looked like - healthy competition to get the best for the nation.

AndSunGorilla:
Exactly in probably his last game of the WC, he would definitely clutch at straws now.

Yes ooo. This should be his swan song. That's why I didn't want him to win 😏😏🤣🤣.

Fly in the apothecary

Odunayaw:
You're correct but these things are not without context. It is the desperation that stinks; taking advantage of the rule for cheap gain.

Yes it is not cheating but there are unwritten gentleman rules even against what is correct. For example in the NBA when the clock is running out, the winning team doesn't go looking to score. No rule against it but gentleman agreement.

I agree the rule is very stupid. A yellow at worst.

At that point anybody can be ungentlemanly oo. In any case, Messi is human too. He's not an angel. If he hadn't acted that way it'd have been a show of large heartedness but since he didn't, it only shows he's not perfect.

AndSunGorilla:
Let me add that one of Africa's greatest striker Gangling Rashidi Yekini was born and groomed in Kaduna he started his football career there too.

Amokachi the Benue born bull also was groomed in Kaduna.

Odunayaw:
Messi acted there how every captain acts sha. We see them all grasp at straws to salvage any situation. I mean the Swiss are recent examples. As far as he didn't go haranguing the ref I don't see the big deal.

It's that nonsense with Cucurella that I hated very much. Yet if that's enough to vilify him, let such righteous judge tell us what to do with Maradona

What Messi did against Cucurella is on point. Very much on point. It's the rule of the game. He did not cheat. Somebody flouted the rule of the game and Messi only drew the refs attention to it.

Flip it and let it be Messi who covered his mouth while talking to Cucurella and then he's let off the hook - you'd see the paraxoyms of criticisms that would follow.

What we should attack is not Messi but such a stupid rule. The rule is stupid because shit talking is part of any sport.

Second, red card should not be the punishment. A yellow card as warning should be the first resort.

ChrisKels:
The little believe I had in northern players was killed by Musa Yahaya. I loved him so much, only for him to turn out to be a flash in the pan.

From these players you listed here, only Zadok is the one I rate. All these una Bewene this and Bewene that, I no follow oo.

Bewene good. You get old eye na. Watch that boy match against Poland again. Watch how confident, how quick, how lithe he is. If he develops well, I think we got something good in our hands.

Na Zadok I no even trust. I don't like all those kind of players. Dribble to touch line players. Cut and shoot players.

Papi85:
💯👊

Since the core of our youth team players having been picked from a particular region we haven’t achieved anything tangible in Africa or even made it to the global stage for some time now.

The regions that have provided talents to our cadet teams are the SW,SS and SE and 40%-50% of these players mostly ends up in the super eagles and top leagues in the world

If person talk am em mouf no go bend. As I see the list self my mind comot for the team. They may come back to prove me wrong though this time around

Just as blacks dominate sprint and the NBA in America so SW, SE and SS dominate the pipeline of our football. I don't know why this should be difficult to say. But at the same time make we know say as this demographic dominate in this area of sport na so dem dominate in other not so palatable areas of our national life oo. So that the day that is stated, nobody should accuse whoever states it of tribalism.

But for now we are talking football and what you said is factual. Southerners are more athletic than northerners (excluding the middle belt)

solonnachi:
Thank you very much Sir. Amen. I sincerely appreciate 🙏

My condolences brother. Take heart. We are all counting time.

Sugarboyy:
Thegoodjoe please answer this question because overtime I have also wondered how you would be supporting Ronaldo over Messi in any ramifications with your kinda football philosophy

Why not? It's his choice like he said in response to me that he's more of a Ronaldo than Messi fan.

You must realise that people are free to be sentimental. I recognise Messi as the greatest but I'd chose Maradonna over him any time, any day. I love Maradonna for even non footballing reasons.

Messi is the goat but he's not my hero. Maradonna is.