Douglas Baye-Osagie
dbayeosagie@yahoo.com
For too long, Nigerian football has been trying to get a real home. We have wandered from Uyo to Kaduna to Calabar to Benin to Asaba to Abuja. From the Godswill Akpabio Stadium to quiet, comfortable arenas, chasing form, chasing luck, chasing a feeling we left behind. We have struggled to qualify for tournaments which were a stroll in the past. But when we look back at our glory days in the 80s and 90s, our national team has an address in Nigeria, and that address has always been Lagos.
The news that the Teslim Balogun Stadium is back should not be treated as a footnote. It should be a national football decision. It is time to bring the Super Eagles home.
We must thank the Governor of Lagos State, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, for the beautifully refurbished Teslim Balogun Stadium. With its green, lush grass, modern seats and improved facilities, Lagos has again shown why it sets the pace. The stadium is ready, and it is befitting of the Super Eagles.
Lagos is not just a city. It is the spiritual headquarters of Nigerian football. This is where our legend was built. At the old National Stadium in Surulere, Nigeria became invincible. From the early 1980s to the mid-2000s, for almost 25 years, the Super Eagles did not lose a competitive match in Lagos. It was a fortress in the truest sense. Teams did not come to Lagos to play Nigeria; they came to survive Lagos.
That unbeaten run was not luck. It was Lagos itself. The noise, the talking drums, the traders who shut their shops early, the thousands who trekked to the stadium under the sun, the famous Lagos pressure that sat on the necks of opponents before the referee even blew his whistle. When you played in Lagos, you felt 20 million people breathing down on you. That kind of pressure does not break real players; it builds them.
Here is the painful truth: this generation of Super Eagles has never really played under that pressure. Victor Osimhen, Ademola Lookman, Alex Iwobi, Ola Aina — they have carried Nigeria across the world, but they have never felt a true, roaring Lagos crowd behind them in a competitive game. They have played in good stadiums with polite crowds. They have never played where a misplaced pass is booed and a brave tackle is worshipped like a goal.
Maybe that is why we have not gotten the results we want. Maybe that is part of why we missed two World Cups and the Olympics. We removed our best weapon — our crowd. We made the Super Eagles comfortable, and comfortable teams do not qualify.
Bringing football back to Teslim Balogun also makes football sense. In an era when 90 percent of our squad flies in from Europe, Lagos is logic. No connecting flights to Uyo. No wasted hours in transit to Abuja. They land at Murtala Muhammed International Airport and are in camp within an hour. They sleep better, recover faster, and Eric Chelle gets an extra training session to drill his pressing, high-intensity philosophy.
For Chelle, Lagos is the perfect ally. He is a coach who wants intensity. What better place to demand intensity than a stadium that will demand it with him? Lagos will not accept laziness or sideways football. The fans will push, shout, drag the team forward when legs are tired. That is not hostility. That is accountability. And this team needs it.
The refurbished Teslim Balogun sits in the shadow of the National Stadium, a daily reminder of when Nigeria never lost at home.
We have tried everything else. We have tried polite. We have tried quiet. It did not work.
Let’s try home.
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