Home Based Players Can't Compete For Super Eagles Positions - Imama

Home Based Players Can't Compete For Super Eagles Positions - Imama

By Sampson Adedeji

As the clamour for the usage of local players in the Super Eagles A team, continue, former assistant coach of Super Eagles Imama Amapakabo has bluntly played down the chances of any of them making the team.

The rumour has it that one of major clause Nigeria Football Federation wanted to insert in the new contract of Super Eagles head coach Gernot Rohr is to scout for the local players to be included in the team, BSN Reports.

Imama in a chat with journalists, he debunked their chances, saying none of them is good enough to compete with their counterpart from Europe.

" We should forget about running away from the truth. If you tell the people a lie for a very long time, they tend to believe the lie.

“Do an assessment, who are the players in the league that can compare with the players in Europe right now? Whichever we have right now that is doing very well in the league, in the next three months is going to be in Europe,” he said.

The players that play in North Africa and South Africa, when they go out to Europe and it doesn’t work out they still go back to their leagues, why are our players not interested in coming back to our league?

“How many players that left Akwa United and things didn’t work out well for them in Europe, how many of them have come back to the club?”

In the last five years, go back and do a study, where are the players coming out from? They are coming from the academy. We’re selling players direct from kindergarten to Europe because academy as far as my definition says is like a kindergarten school. We’re not selling players from our league to Europe.

“So let us first look at that angle, why is it that the Europeans have not come to our league to look for players? Look at the current Super Eagles players, it is only Etebo and Ezenwa that played in our league, the rest like Ndidi and Chukwueze were all gotten from the academies. So these are things that we see that shows that there is a serious fundamental problem," he concluded