Super Eagles are many goals down

For poor online documentation, Nigeria’s national football teams may have lost an opportunity to keep memories of sport events they were celebrated.

Results of an online search on Sunday show that neither the teams nor the Nigerian Football Federation keeps memories of the medals celebrated by the Super Eagles and other national football teams.

At the moment, the NFF’s website – thenff.com – is the only medium sport lovers could visit to read about history of Nigerian football and its success stories.

But its archive is restricted to a few lists such as former presidents of the Federation and its past secretary generals.

It also publishes a list of former coaches of the Super Eagles, starting from John Finch, an English who handled the team in 1949, and ends with Steven Keshi.

While it makes references to international competitions where the Super Eagles and other teams did well, there is no mention of the line-up of players that won the medals. And there is also nowhere on the website one can find photographs of the players – whether portraits or group photographs.

Also, there is little or no information on players currently in the Super Eagles, just as there is no information about the former players, especially those that won titles while in the team.

For the various teams – the Super Eagles, Super Falcons, Under 21 squad etc. – there is no place they can call their own on the cyberspace. The Super Eagles does not own a website,  much less the Super Falcons. Hence, they rely on the NFF to tell their stories. 

The Super Eagles is, however, not the only national team that depends on its national football association for online communication. Many other national teams also perch on their FAs except that they get much more attention than Super Eagles is currently getting.

For instance, each of the Spanishnational teams gets a generous attention on a site managed by the country’s FA.

The site features the profile and photograph of every footballer that has played for Spain. 

There are also records of their teams’ historical successes dating back to 1964. For each team, visitors could read exciting profiles of the players and their achievements in both texts and photographs.

Besides, the poor outlook of the Super Eagles is a sharp contrast with that of its handler, Sunday Oliseh. 

The coach’s online resource centre – sundayoliseh.tv – tracks football events and highpoints from one continent to another. The stories are accompanied with exciting videos and photographs.  

While the Super Eagles is already doing well on Twitter, it has yet to adopt Oliseh’s website style of communication. Perhaps, this could save its vanishing achievements and help it to tell an elaborate tale of its history.