Ex International, Emmanuel Babayaro, Olympic gold-medalist with the first Dream Team in Atlanta 96′ has stated that the frustrating results and misfortunes in the national teams is testament to the neglect of grassroots development and over-reliance of foreign based players in Nigeria football.

He revealed in a chat with brila.net “In Nigeria we take things for granted, The handwriting has been on the wall, things are not working well in our national teams because we have neglected development of football from the grassroots, it doesn’t have much to do with the coach but everyone is quick to blame the coach for the misfortunes.”

The former goalkeeper also added that Nigeria is far from building a Super Eagles team for the future “The Management of football has failed as we can’t produce players from the league to fairly contest for a shirt in the national team, in the past most of our talents were homegrown talents who had real patriotism.

The day we will get close to building a Super Eagles team is when we will return to the grassroots.”