Needless to say, only deep disappointment has met many people who banked heavily on outstanding performance from African teams during the World Cup 2010. Putting aside the fact that Ghana qualified for the quarter finals by beating team USA, the rest of Africa is disappointed that the teams performed too poorly. To my mind, it appears that the expectation was far too high given the basic organizational and structural issues that produce consistently good performance on soccer pitches. In truth, virtually all African teams are lacking in that. The disappointment in the performance of the Nigerian team was too much for its politicians to take. As a result, the delightfully named president Jonathan Goodluck of Nigeria unilaterally suspended the national team by announcing that soccer activity at the international level will remain in abeyance for two years. While that is laughable in the main and is bound to lead to conflict with FIFA as stated here, I see a positive side to all this.
To begin with, my libertarian view is that the Nigerian people would have much more to gain from a diversion of taxes away from funding private activity as soccer and into more public goods and services. Bearing in mind that Nigeria is a country of more than 100 million people, it is not useful to spend public money on financing sports played by rich professionals employed by clubs in Europe and Asia. So the president should not have suspended the Nigerian Football Federation's activities but merely withheld state subvention for all time. in this way, soccer organization in Nigeria would remain a matter for private organization.
Update: President J. Goodluck rescinded the decision after two days. He has no libertarian instincts after all.
Clip Art: http://www.cksinfo.com/sports/soccer/index.html
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