₦airaland Forum

I tip Ivory Coast to humiliate this German team

...

I told y'all that this match is gonna be a bloodbath

Mybettingtips:
One aspect you have to give Morocco their flowers is the scouting and poaching method they use in luring players with Moroccan roots. This sensation plays for Lille in France and captained the U-21 French team. Now he’s playing for the Morocco national team.

We’ve missed a lot of players that could have been poached early to strengthen our squad because of our lackadaisical approach to things. NFF drama, team local coach drama, team you must integrate local npfl players into the main team. Morocco league is way better than our league but there are only two players from their league in the World Cup team. 2 old backup keepers. Why didn’t they travel with more players from their local league?

Someone said people are exaggerating by saying Morocco team is ruling African football. They’ve been this good for the past 4-5 years. The only African team to enter World Cup semifinal. Made it to last Afcon final and will still go far in this year’s World Cup. How are they not the best team in Africa? Our super eagles can’t even qualify for an expanded 48 team World Cup. 10 slots and we lost our position to Sad Africa.

When you have issues like poor facilities, poorly maintained pitches, unpaid wages/match bonuses, players strikes, and many more, it taints our image and makes scouting foreign borns tough. We need to fix our brand to pull these foreign talents!

I would like the NFF to arrange friendlies against the following nations:

- Italy
- Switzerland
- Canada
- Turkey
- Norway
- Germany

I just wanna see something

Why is nairaland allowing fake AI content to be posted? Why do the mods have such a bad filtering process??

Germany and Curacao is gonna be a blood bath. I'm worried lol

9JAMac10:
Scotland vs haiti is the perfect example of 2 countries that shouldn’t make it LOL most boring 23 minutes of my life holy shit. wtf are these 2 teams playing for seriously 😂

We need to go back to 32. Too many redundant matches being played. Maybe 36 teams max

yinkeys:
Qatari football just left Nigeria behind
Their local league investment is paying off
No one saw them get something against Switzerland

Go and play this Qatari team against the likes of Poland and Portugal and see what happens.

Forget about Team USA. These two teams have set the standard. Kudos to the Morrocan players and technical staff for the result

mostob:
Roberto Carlos and R9 would be fuming on the stand.

What happened to Brazil?
Since that 7-1 loss against Germany, they have been ordinary

You are not giving enough credit to Morocco and other countries. The standard of football has risen and the gap between low and high ranked teams is closing. The usage of dual nationals has changed the game.

SymphonyRad:
80% of Moroccos players are dual nationals

When you see these trends, it discourages investment in our domestic league.

See as Morrocco is filled to the brim with Foreign borns

Igor Thiago has looked dull all half. Bring on Endrick!

Vini Jr you beauty!!! Game on!!

Give Chelle credit where it is due! We took these Morrocan guys all the way to penalties on their home turf.

These water breaks are stupid!! Why kill the momentum!!

Morocco is a serious nation. They don't cower in fear when facing giants.

Nomyth:
Football has been effectively split into 4 quarters like American sports with these commercials during water breaks.

The truth of the matter is that those hydration breaks were not done for player well-being. It was all a ruse to satisfy sponsors, especially Americans ones.

Goke7:
For once carragher talk sense

Did Carragher really say this?

Also, Partey was not denied because of missing paperwork but rather because he has charges against him and is set to stand trial. According to Canadian law, you can be deemed inadmissible even without a foreign conviction.

Outstanding showing from the USMNT. Way to kick things off! Take a bow Poch!

If lowly ranked European teams like Bosnia are this good, then Africa should be worried.

If this match is any indication of how lowly ranked teams will perform, then expanding the tournament was a terrible mistake.

We don't need eyesore matches like this.

This Mexican team is very poor

JohnBullMySon:
Goal for mexicana mexicana

Goal for all Africa

Rejoice!!

Viva Mexico Cabrones!!

Viva Mexico Pendejos!!

48 teams and no Nigeria.


We are sinking in every domain as a country.

I pray to Father God that Chelle is given time by the NFF. We need long term evolution and consistency. Let's not lose hope. It's a damn shame we are not at the Mundial but please for the love of God, let's give Eric Sekou a chance.

zicky:
In other news.

Perez has delivered his polling unit

Nigerians are not angry enough.

It is devastating that we will be seated home during this expanded version of the world cup. A generation of talent wasted.

Damn the NFF to bloody hell!!

NasirIbnLaAhad:
I'm not quite sure of what to make of Osimhen's absence from the upcoming friendlies. Chelle's justification was that Osimhen "may have to change clubs." But if we're to go by the actual reporting from Galatasaray itself, the club confirmed three weeks ago that they have made a firm decision to keep Osimhen for the 2026-27 season, closing off any prospect of a summer departure despite reported interest from teams like Madrid and Barca. They also structured a multi-layered commercial financing model to sustain his €21 million annual wage package, sourcing funds from merchandise revenue and sponsorship agreements to name just a few. So as of three weeks ago, Galatasaray's public position was that he's staying, and I guess that was that. And yet somehow a transfer concern urgent enough to pull him from two high-profile international friendlies has materialised?

The way I see it, there's a clear and obvious discrepancy here. The optimistic reading here is that something has shifted dramatically in the last few weeks with top clubs like Barcelona pushing hard (which is possible given the noise around him). The pessimistic reading is that Osimhen simply didn't want to come.

I'm not sure which angle is more credible at the moment, but do I blame people for piling on Osimhen about this? Not really. Let's look at the pattern here.

When we had our decisive World Cup play-off final against DR Congo, Osimhen hobbled off at half-time and we struggled in his absence. We went on to play rubbish and lost on penalties, missing a World Cup for the second successive time. Obviously, not his fault. He was injured. I personally have -- and will always -- attribute that loss to the poor physical condition of the players who refused to train because of NFF's politics and the poor timing of the strike. As for Osimhen, he had already missed 2-3 qualifying games due to injury, when we had become far too reliant on him during that campaign. Then at AFCON 2025, even when he was there, in the round of 16 win over Mozambique, Osimhen was seen in a heated exchange with Lookman after a misunderstanding. He asked to be substituted and was also the first to leave the dressing room when the teams were leaving the stadium.

Now, to his credit, Osimhen responded in the very next game against Algeria with a complete centre-forward performance , scoring, assisting, combining effectively with Lookman, and winning Man of the Match. Any talk of division was firmly put to rest by the unity Nigeria showed on the pitch. That's the complicated thing about him: on his best days, he is the heartbeat of that squad. The quality is not the question. The question is reliability and engagement. It feels like he misses out at the most crucial moments, and I understand the grievance of the Nigerian fans who feel some type of way about this.

Some people here will say, "Well what about Lookman?" And I would respond that there is genuinely nothing to fault with him here. He had a serious season with a club that has been proactive and formal in protecting his workload. He played his heart out at AFCON, and even though he had a poor WC qualifying run, I could see the passion in his play, even though his form was terrible. The NFF arguably had this coming after ignoring Atletico's concerns in March. Lookman is not the story.

For Osimhen, the picture that has built up over the last 18 months is of a player whose relationship with the Super Eagles is increasingly conditional. The injury absences during qualifying -- some genuinely unavoidable -- the AFCON incident, the early dressing room exit, and now a transfer-uncertainty excuse that doesn't fully square with reporting from three weeks ago. I mean, surely it's not hard to see why people are upset. What it says about Osimhen is not that he doesn't care. I personally don't think that's true. We've watched him show up and performs at his best when he does show up. But there's a growing pattern of his club priorities, his commercial situation, his personal circumstances taking precedence over Nigeria duty in a way that goes beyond what even other elite African internationals accept.

Sadio Mané played in a World Cup qualifier days after his father died. Didier Drogba turned up for the Ivory Coast through chaos. Osimhen is a generational Nigerian talent who, at 27 and in his prime, has chosen not to play against Poland and Portugal because of..... a transfer situation that his club publicly says doesn't exist right now?

I mean, come on.

It is just a pair of friendlies. People are looking too much into things. Let's us build a squad that does not hinge on Osimhen, Lookman nor any single player. It'll serve us well in the future.

I pray to God that we retain Chelle. We seriously need long term planning and managing.