Former Super Eagles assistant coach, Usman Abdallah, has claimed that no Nigerian coach is qualified to manage the country’s senior men’s national team.
Abdallah’s comments follow the Nigeria Football Federation’s (NFF) announcement that it is considering hiring a foreign coach after Finidi George’s resignation last month.
As the federation searches for the next coach, reports suggest that officials have approached Portuguese coach Jose Peseiro for a possible return, and are also considering Frenchman Herve Renard. Abdallah.
“It doesn’t bother me whether the NFF is considering bringing Jose Peseiro back or if they want to hire Hervé Renard as the Eagles coach as long as they can afford to pay their salaries,” he said.
“The issue is, I have heard people say they don’t want us to spend money on the foreign coach but show me a coach qualified for the Eagles job who is a Nigerian whether home or abroad. The fact is we don’t have it.
“The only person we have is Salisu Yusuf, who a lot of people don’t want because of what happened in the past, but I don’t want to argue about that. Nigerian coaches have always been serving as assistants and none of us can argue that we were better than those we’ve worked with.”
However, the former Enyimba coach criticized the NFF for allowing foreign coaches to bring their own assistants.
“Appointing Peseiro or whoever is no issue, but why allow them to come with their assistants when some of us have always been named? “How do we tap from their experience and grow to become the national team coaches? This is the mistake the federation has always made, and they need to correct that.”
The Super Eagles will begin their AFCON qualifiers in September, and the NFF will need to resolve the coaching issue in time, as Nigeria start on a good page and hopes to get their World Cup qualifiers back on track after a poor start that saw them claim just three points from a possible 12, sitting fifth in their six-team qualifying group.
