Amaju Pinnick, President of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF), has sent a message to the incoming Super Eagles’ new coach to give chances to players in the Nigeria Professional Football League (NPFL).
SportsDayOnline.com reported that the NFF is close to appointing former Cameroon head coach, Antonio Conceicao, to take charge of the national team.
Conceicao is now set to replace Augustine Eguavoen, who left the role after failing to qualify the Super Eagles of Nigeria for this year’s World Cup in Qatar.
Using the example of Chelsea’s Moroccan player, Hakim Ziyech, underlined that no player is indispensable whether or not he is playing for a top European club.
Recall that Morocco manager Vahid Halilhodzic omitted Ziyech from his 2021 Africa Cup of Nations “AFCON” list for non-footballing reasons and in March the Chelsea star rejected a call-up to feature in the 2022 World Cup playoff against the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Speaking on Arise News, Pinnick said: “Some of our boys at home are doing very well, we just hired a scout that is submitting names of very fantastic players in the local league.
“It is football, 11v11, the Egyptian national team when they came to the Nations Cup, had only six players based abroad, all the rest were their home-based players.
“Morocco as well, where is [Hakim] Ziyech, the boy in Chelsea, said he is bigger than his country, his country has qualified for the World Cup now.
“Eric Cantona and Ginola in 1998 said without them France is nothing, what happened? France won the World Cup.
“Aimé Jacquet went to the World Cup with Thierry Henry, with Pires, with those players, Laurent Blanc. At the end of the day they won the World Cup, so there is nobody that is indispensable.
“I told them in our [NFF’s] Executive Committee meeting, are we going to have a percentage of home-based players in any of the Super Eagles lineup? Is it going to be part of the contract of the coach?
“They should look deeply into it because we also need to develop it,” he said.
