Nigerian Ndubuisi Egbo is little known on his own continent even though he played professionally in both Egypt and South Africa and kept goal for the Super Eagles.
His playing career ended in Albania, a most unlikely destination for an African footballer but a country where he has gone on to write his own piece of personal history.
Egbo holds the distinction of being the only African coach to have won a league title in Europe, hopefully breaking down an up-to-now formidable barrier of entry.
African coaches in Europe have been sparse; a handful of Angolans in the Portuguese league, the Senegalese Omar Daf in France’s Ligue 2 and former Nigerian superstar Sunday Oliseh, who took Fortuna Sittard up to the Dutch first division but has battled to get a job since.
But Egbo’s achievement is something special, even if in one of the smaller European countries, renowned for the repressive dictatorship that kept it closed off from the world for some three decades until the early 1990s.
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“Even before I ended my career, I already started with the goalkeeping coaching license. When I was playing, a lot of coaches saw something in me, and many of them told me ‘you are going to be a good coach in the future’ because of the way they saw that I read the game. So that was in my mind early, that when I finish my playing career, I was to go into coaching,” he tells FORBES AFRICA.
Egbo started in 2011 as goalkeeper coach, and then from 2013 as assistant coach with FK Bylis. He joined FK Tirana as goalkeeper coach and assistant coach in 2014 and was three times asked to step in as caretaker coach when there was a change at the helm of the team.
“I refused, because I know how huge and big Tirana are as a team. It was only in 2019 that I accepted
the head coach role, when I finally believed it was the right time. I took my time to learn a lot from the men who coached Tirana, and also the experience I have with my coaches in Nigeria. I saw a lot of the mistakes, the positives and the negatives and from there I created my own philosophy of approach and methodology of work and that helped me a lot. And also knowing the language, being able to communicate with my players, not needing any translator, made it much easier for me to manage.”
It was a dream season for Egbo, who took over with the side in the doldrums but very quickly lifted them all the way to the title.
“My first game in charge was against Partizani, which is the biggest derby in the country, and we have not won for six years. I had a premonition that we are going to win the game even before the game and when we won the game, it was the catalyst that propelled. We went 16 games unbeaten, jumping from eighth out of 10 teams and hauling in a 12-point deficit. It was like we came back from the dead to be alive again.”
It was a groundbreaking achievement for an African in the European football industry.
“I never thought about that until towards the end of that season, when we were almost sure mathematically that were going to win the league. And then people started to call me from Nigeria and say, ‘do you know that you’re going to be the first African to win a league in Europe’. But in my work, I don’t look at the accolades. I’m the type who wants to let my work speak for itself. That is how I do my thing. At the end of the day like I always say to my players, ‘let us do the job’. And at end of the season then we can start to count our gains and our losses.”
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