By Toye Olori
LAGOS, Feb 18 1997 (IPS)

“Welcome to Wembley Stadium” reads the sign on the railing of a flyover, but this Wembley is not in Britain — it’s under the connecting bridge along the Ojuelegba- Ikorodu road here.

Nor does it have the 80,000-capacity of its English namesake. The barbed-wire that surrounds its main field, a concrete floor roughly the size of a tennis court, separates it from about 500 spectators.

“We name it Wembley because of the shape of the place and also because it is shielded from the sun and rain by the flyover,” explains Omos Joseph, President of the Wembley ‘International’ Football Association (WIFA).

WIFA co-ordinates street football in Jibowu, a community in Lagos. “We have used the under-bridge space since 1976 but WIFA only came to be in 1994 with the aims of regulating and controlling football within the streets of this community,” Joseph tells IPS.

The association organises league matches for Jibowa’s eight streets and sponsors a Football Association (FA) cup and an Easter cup competitions there. The FA cup has monetary awards: 3,000 naira (about 37 U.S. dollars) for the winner, 2,500 for the runners-up and 2,000 naira for the third place. In the other two tourneys, successful teams get shields.

The Association also runs a football academy for boys aged 10 to 15 years. So far, four of its students have reached Nigeria’s first division.

Wembley-Lagos is one of many mini-stadia and open spaces at street corners where, in the absence of a national football academy, Nigerian youngsters have trained and played before going on to big-time clubs, the national squad and foreign teams.

For example, the Abete pitch in Iwaya, another Lagos suburb, has produced two outstanding goalkeepers, Alloy Agu and Dosu Joseph, both of whom play professional football in Europe. World famous Emmanuel Amunike was discovered on a mini-pitch in Ajegunle, also in Lagos.

The international flavour at these ‘stadia’ does not end with their names: the young players adopt the names of their international idols; some of their teams bear the names of European club sides; and their competitions have titles like ‘African Cup of Nations’.

The importance of these street championships, sponsored through the monthly dues of members, the sale of competition forms and sometimes donations from philanthropists in their communities, is not to be underestimated. It’s there that club coaches scout for talent.

But Joseph, whose association has about 250 members, has a grouse against those who have graduated from the street. “Street- corner football club sides have produced fine footballers for the nation. Some of them have gone professional abroad and they are doing well, but none of them has come back to help develop the game,” he says.

Despite this, Nigerian football has developed. The under 17- team won the first Junior World Cup in Beijing in 1985, the 1996 Olympic Gold Medal for football went to Nigeria and, on Feb. 9 this year, the under-17s bagged the UEFA-CAF Meridien Cup.

And, according to reports here, the names of Nigerian soccer stars will early next year adorn FIFA’s International Football Hall of Champions, a new project sited in Disneyland, Paris.

The West African nation’s prowess has not gone unnoticed. When he visited the country recently, Heinz Marotzkee, Special Assistant to FIFA President Joao Havelange, lauded Nigeria’s meteoric rise in world soccer.

“Nigeria, being the best pupil of Havelange’s concept of football development, has vindicated and justified the initiative of Havelange in introducing age-grade world championships,” Marotzkee said. “Not many countries in the world have the quality of individually skilled players in world professional soccer as Nigeria.”

He said the Olympic gold in Atlanta was a logical consequence of the steady pace of development of the nation’s football, although he also expressed regret that, through administrative blunders by the Nigerian Football Association (NFA), the country had been denied the opportunity to participate in the 1997 Under- 17 World Cup in Egypt.

Despite the spectacular performance by Nigerian players, football administration here has been beset by wrangling, the irregular dismissal of coaches, shoddy preparations for international engagements and the takeover of the NFA by the sports ministry.

“The sports ministry’s negative interference in football matters had bred inconsistent policy that had adversely affected the organisational capability of the NFA,” says one-time football administrator George Akpata.

Recently, Sports Minister Jim Nwobodo ordered the dismissal of Amodu Shuaibu, coach of the senior national team, the Super Eagles, for criticising him and his ministry. A court action by Shuaibu has stalled the appointment of a new coach for the team, which is to meet Guinea in March for a World Cup qualifier.

At present, the NFA is searching for a new foreign technical adviser to occupy the slot left by Dutchman Bonfere Jo, who left after taking the under 23-team to Gold in Atlanta. He, too, complained of interference.

But Nwobodo blames the problems that have plagued football administration in Nigeria on the nonchalant attitudes of NFA officials in the past.

“The era of avoidable and embarrassing mistakes and ineptitude like the forgotten passport saga will be a thing of the past,” he said. He was referring to a protest Benin submitted to the Confederation of African Football (CAF) after Nigerian officials left the passports of the under 17-team in Lagos when they went to play the Beninois in the western city of Ibadan late last year. Benin won the protest.

Under “the new administrative set-up put in place at the NFA”, the association “now has a better focus,” says Nwobodo. “… We are now poised to match the great strides of our players on the pitch with sound, modern and efficient administration.”

But Akpata feels the NFA should be allowed to operate autonomously. “The autonomy will galvanise the football technical crew into greater heights in the quest of making Nigeria a world power in football,” he says.

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