Jay Jay Okocha
IN football, there are no prizes for second place. As it will be for the contestants in the GUINNESS® FOOTBALL CHALLENGE™, it’s all about working hard, aiming as high as possible, and most importantly, getting out there and giving it your best. As the saying goes, if you don’t shoot you won’t score – and when I look back over my career I’m certainly living proof of that!
I feel very blessed to have had so many great years in football. Over the course of my career, African football acquired far greater respect throughout the world and I hope that my contribution had something to do with that. I also hope that my story managed to inspire many young African players to aspire to greatness.
Who knows, maybe some of the younger African guys now playing at some of the world’s top clubs – fellow Nigerians such as Chelsea’s Jon Obi Mikel or Milan’s Taye Taiwo – might never have believed they could make it to the top without seeing the players of my generation take Nigeria to the World Cup for the first time in 1994.
And maybe it was watching my fellow Guinness football stars, Marcel Desailly, Kalusha Bwalya and Rigobert Song that inspired the latest round of contestants to step up and take part in this exciting new season of the GUINNESS® FOOTBALL CHALLENGE™.
When I was growing up, Nigerian football – and African football in general – certainly didn’t have the gold-plated reputation it has today. And my beginnings were very humble. As far as I can remember, we used to play with any round thing we could find, and whenever we managed to get hold of a ball, that was just abonus! But through a combination of dedication and ambition (and a bit of talent) I managed to achieve some of the game’s highest accolades.
Jay Jay Okocha in Guinness Football Challenge
I often get asked about what my greatest goal was, and I am lucky to be able to say that there are many to choose from. But I know that one of the most famous came when I was a young player at Eintracht Frankfurt and I dribbled around (okay, teased!) the legendary German keeper Oliver Kahn before sticking it in the back of the net. That one definitely put me on the map!
I signed for Turkish side Fenerbahçe not long after that and managed to net 36 goals in 60 games while I was there, a record I’m still very proud of to this day. Many of those came from free-kicks, which ended up becoming something of a specialty of mine. But looking back, I have to say that one of the most important and meaningful free-kicks I ever scored came during my second game and home debut for Nigeria.
We were losing 1–0 against Algeria in a game we had to win to keep our hopes of qualifying for World Cup ’94 alive and it was my free-kick that brought us level before we went on to win 4-1, which helped us on our way to the World Cup Finals for the first time in Nigeria’s history – quite a way to mark my home debut. And we didn’t embarrass ourselves on the big stage either.
Having won the African Cup of Nations earlier that year, my fellow Super Eagles and I managed to get beyond the group stage at USA ’94 and only went out after a thrilling but ultimately disappointing second round knock-out game – that has since gone down in World Cup history – against a legendary Italian side that would eventually finish runners-up.
I later went on to captain my country at the 2002 World Cup Finals and as any player would tell you, there can be no greater honour than that. The one honour that did elude me, however, was the African Player of Year award. But I did make it into Pele’s FIFA 100 in 2004 – a list of the greatest 125 living players of all time chosen by the great man himself. Do compliments get much higher? Like I said, if you don’t shoot….