Revolution or Recycling? Nigeria, Belgium, and the Long Walk to Football Identity By Ibrahim Jatto

In Nigeria, football is our national masquerade. We drag it out every four years, paint its face with green-white-green, beat the drums of patriotism, and then stand stupefied as the masquerade stumbles, misses its steps, and crashes into the mud. Afterwards, we mutter the same dirges: “Our boys tried.” “The referee was biased.” “We go try next time.” Recycling lamentation is our greatest footballing tradition.

But nations who understand football not as lottery but as architecture do not live like this. Belgium, for instance, once lived in the wilderness of footballing irrelevance. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, they were the joke of Europe—a team too ordinary to frighten even the Faroe Islands. Yet, by 2018, they were boasting the “Golden Generation”: Eden Hazard, Kevin De Bruyne, Romelu Lukaku, Vincent Kompany, Thibaut Courtois. Semifinalists at the World Cup. A global football identity. How?

Two words: Michel Sablon.

Sablon, a quiet architect, did not do what we do in Nigeria—appoint a “technical committee” of yesterday’s men who confuse nostalgia for strategy. He rewrote Belgium’s footballing DNA. From 2001, he enforced a uniform template:

Standardized philosophy: every Belgian youth team, from U-8 to U-21, played one system—4-3-3, possession-based, pressing football. No confusion, no improvisation. The boy in Bruges and the boy in Liège learned the same language.

Talent democratization: small pitches for young kids, more touches of the ball, less reliance on early physical maturity. Skill over brawn.

Coach retraining: 2,000 coaches re-schooled to teach the philosophy. Not “run and kick,” but “think and pass.”

Identity over miracle: Belgium stopped hunting for miracle No.10s every two years. They built a conveyor belt of De Bruynes.

This was not football by accident; it was football by design.

Now let us return to Nigeria. We are the Brazil of Africa, they say. Yet, what is our football identity? Is it the 1994 swagger of Yekini, Amuneke, and Oliseh? Or the improvisational samba of Jay-Jay Okocha? Or the muscular hustle of Mikel Obi’s Chelsea-honed pragmatism? Nigeria has no fixed identity—just episodic brilliance, scattered like pearls in the dustbin of chaos.

Our academies? They sprout like mushrooms after rain, but each one is a personal fiefdom. No national curriculum. No Michel Sablon. A 13-year-old in Jos is taught differently from a 13-year-old in Enugu. By the time they meet at U-17 camp, it is Babel: dribblers colliding with runners, defenders who see hoofing as philosophy, midfielders who believe football is WWE.

To revolutionize Nigerian football, we must commit the same heresy Michel Sablon committed in Belgium: destroy the old order. Some hard, Pius-style questions for Abuja and the Glass House:

.Do we have the courage to standardize? One system, one style, across all youth levels. Not coach-dependent, but Nigeria-dependent.

Can we retrain our coaches? Not the retired uncle who still thinks football is “enter field and hustle.” We need schools of thought, not schools of hustle.

Will we democratize access? Football must leave the urban elites and touch the barefoot boy in Daura, the girl in Akure, the fisherman’s son in Bayelsa. Talent is our crude oil; but we flare it daily.

Can we sacrifice short-term glory for long-term structure? Belgium missed some tournaments while incubating their Golden Generation. Nigerians, with our love for instant gratification, must accept that we may miss a Nations Cup while building a World Cup-winning identity.

The Belgian template was not magic. It was planning, discipline, and the humility to start again. In Nigeria, we mistake abundance for strategy. Because we are gifted, we assume we will always find another Jay-Jay, another Kanu. But gifts without structure rot. And rot is what Nigerian football has perfected.

If Belgium could rise from wilderness to the World Cup semifinals, why not Nigeria? If Sablon could script a template in Brussels, why can’t we write ours in Abuja? The tragedy is not that we lack talent. The tragedy is that we lack shame. Every failure becomes another recycling of excuses instead of revolution.

Until we build an identity, Nigeria will remain the eternal masquerade of world football—colorful, noisy, dramatic, but doomed to stumble.