As this year’s FIFA U17 World Cup continues in Qatar with Nigeria, five-time champions of the Cadet Mundial, absent for the second straight edition, the winning formula used by Ambassador Fanny Ikhayere Amun at Japan ’93 has been forwarded as a solution.
Sports247 reports that the Eaglets are not at Qatar 2025 and will not be at the next edition to be hosted by the same country in 2027 because the Nigerian squad is still unable to go beyond the WAFU-B zonal qualifiers.
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Failing to scale the zonal hurdle means the Eaglets cannot even feature at the African U17 Cup of Nations, from which the continent’s four representatives emerge for the Cadet Mundial.
The sordid development has now left many Nigerians seeking lasting solutions to the huge setback facing youth football in the country, even as the issue generates heated debate on a daily basis across the nation.
Adding his voice to the debacle is a former member of the medical crews of various Nigerian sports teams in the 80s and 90s, Dr Dipo Odunuga, who declared that Fanny Amun’s success story of Japan ’93 should be revisited in order to revive Nigeria’s glory days.
Odunuga stated as much during the maiden edition of Inside Naija Sports, a live streaming online programme aired via YouTube from the television studio of Sports247 Naija.
The outspoken retired medical practitioner declared, “I believe Nigeria should use the Fanny Amun principle. Fanny Amun’s blueprint was simply to hunt around all over the country for hidden talents.
“I was with him when he was at the Under-17 World Cup in Japan. That was in 1993, but he had already started his build-up in 1991.”
Apart from noting how Amun, fondly called ‘The Transformer of Talents,’ started his preparations early, Odunuga recalled further that the former coach, who later became the secretary-general of then Nigeria Football Association (NFA) and now a publisher, also ensured he discovered talented kids from all across the country.
“Fanny Amun was travelling across all the states in Nigeria. He was spotting and picking a group of boys who were truly under-17 … unlike what we have nowadays.
“He was able to assemble about 200 players to start with, and he later sifted them to 30 just before we departed for Japan. These days, what you see is that they want ready-made players in the Golden Eaglets.”
Odunuga concluded by advocating a thorough and complete reliance on really young players from football academies to fill spots in the Eaglets, as against looking out for players in the league.
“Nowadays, they usually source Eaglets’ players from the national league. But, I always ask, ‘Can you get real under-17 players in our league?’ That, to me, is a fraud.
“That was what we saw in the last squad that Manu Garba rushed in putting together. They said the players were from football academies. But, it’s so sad that many of the players in these so-called academies are almost as old as those in the Super Eagles,” Odunuga lampooned.
