Former Super Eagles goalkeeper, Idah Peterside, says Nigeria would be ready to host the World Cup in the next 40 years, adding that economic and sporting stability is necessary to host such an event.
Nigeria last hosted a global football tournament back in 2009, which was the U-17 FIFA World Cup with Switzerland emerging as champions and Golden Eaglets taking the runner-up spot.
“On record presently, the only playing field which we have is a grass stadium and it is the Uyo stadium, but 20 anything(years) is still very long maybe in the next 40 years, we would have had some kind of stability,” he said on Channels TV Sunrise Daily, October 6.“It’s as simple, as you know coming back to the basis, we must have our stadia okay look at Port Harcourt- now we watched the CAF Cup,” he stated.
“We have a stadium that can keep 40,000 now what we are not doing is that we are not maintaining our facilities now we have a real sports minister this is what we must do we talk sports without the playing ground sports without the facility you can’t play sports in the sky except there’s a sport where you fly a plane so every sport is on earth.”
The 49-year-old underlined the importance of sporting facilities, as sports is incomplete without sufficient stadiums and infrastructure.
“Therefore we need to take care of the earth that produces the sportsmen. We need facilities look at our national stadium in Lagos it’s an eyesore everything is falling apart so we have these stadiums everywhere.”“We have facilities everywhere like in Port Harcourt I live in Port Harcourt now we have three stadiums in Port Harcourt, and we play well. This stadium must be working we have the civic centre that had everything that used to have the swimming pool we used to have things that we would use but these facilities are not being maintained and once these facilities are not maintained how do you expect us to firstly chunk out athletes and be able to contest or contain the world we have to go back to basics.”