Okocha: Missing 1996 AFCON and CAF Ban Denied Eagles More Trophies

In 1994, Nigeria had one of its best football teams ever. But we didn’t fully see how good we were until later. By 1996, many players from that team went to the Olympics. We believed we could win it all. We had already lost to Brazil in the group stage, so going into the semi-final, we thought that lightning would not strike twice. It took us until the last minute to equalise, but everything worked out, even though I missed a penalty earlier that could have given us more time. That Brazilian team had great players, so we must give them credit too.

At that time, our government had problems with South Africa. They stopped us from going to the 1996 Nations Cup. After that, CAF banned us from the 1998 edition. We lost many of those players later on. With the squad we had, I truly believe we could have won at least one more Nations Cup during that time. We had more players in Europe and in good clubs than most other African countries back then.