Former African Footballer of the Year, Victor Ikpeba, has again hit hard on the poor quality of Nigerian football as he decries a drop in the talent pool of the country’s football.
Ikpeba believes Nigeria no longer produce the kind of world class players that were available during his playing days.
“Let us tell ourselves the basic truth, we have a dearth of football talents in the country, some of the players Nigeria produced during the 90s are far better than the present ones.”
The former AS Monaco striker decried the current situation where Nigerian players hardly ply their trade in any of Europe’s topflight leagues, playing instead in places like; Turkey, Russia or Ukraine.
“Also we have to ask some basic and honest questions whether those players have the required top qualities a footballer should possess to play in top clubs from Spain, England, Germany, Italy and France like we had during our time when some of us played in Spain (George Finidi and Mutiu Adepoju); England (Daniel Amokachi, Evan Ekoku, Austin Okocha); Italy (Taribo West, Sunday Oliseh); Germany (Sunday Oliseh) and France (Victor Ikpeba and Samson Siasia),” he said.
“After the USA 1994 World Cup and the Atlanta 1996 Olympics, you can imagine some of us then were playing in some of the top clubs in the world like; AC Milan, Inter Milan, Juventus, Borussia Dortmund, Monaco, Ajax Amsterdam, the list is endless,” he added.
