A long-standing player in the Nigerian Professional Football League (NPFL), Abu Azeez Abolaji has blamed the recent woes faced by the country’s home-based national team at the Championship of African Nations (CHAN 2024) on the mass exodus of the nation’s best domestic players every year.
Sports247 reports that the 31-year-old Azeez, who captained the home-based Eagles for some months before travelling abroad for a short stint at Chittagong Abahani of Bangladesh, reckoned that this year’s CHAN squad would have done better had all their best players remained in tact.
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However, Sports247 recalls, due to the postponement of the competition after its previous set date in March this year up till the ongoing schedule in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania (as well as its semi-autonomous satellite island, Zanzibar), Nigeria ended up losing several members of the original squad in the European summer transfer window.
Azeez, who also starred for a long while with the beach soccer national team, Super Sand Eagles, conceded that the NPFL’s standard has dropped due to the annual mass exodus of players to clubs outside the country on a regular basis.
He affirmed, “The quality of football in the Nigerian league right now has dropped drastically, and it surely showed in Zanzibar. A true reflection of our standard is what we saw at the CHAN. As they say, ‘Foto no dey lie.’
“In the same manner, there is no lie in what we saw at this year’s CHAN. The quality of our football has really, really dropped. It’s just because we don’t have enough resources to keep our best players at home.”
He went on to advocate a situation in which players stay longer with NPFL clubs, instead of juncketing across the world at the end of every season; but quickly admitted that they all need to aspire for the best welfare conditions for their careers.
Azeez added, “(Lack of resources) really affects our football. The best legs in the Nigerian league, after one season, move to other countries to go and continue their football careers abroad.
“This is why we don’t have enough good players in the league. It’s not as it we don’t have good players (for the CHAN Eagles), it’s just that they are not enough,” Azeez opined.
