Nigeria’s Super Falcons have dominated African football to an almost hegemonic degree, but through the decades, that preeminence has always been embodied by a single individual.
In the 1990s, it was Mercy Akide-Udoh, quick off the mark and powerful, who was the sharpest point of a nonetheless talented group of pioneers. The 2000s saw the rise of the peerless Women's Africa Cup of Nations (WAFCON) queen Perpetua Nkwocha, who married skill with precision finishing, and while her reign was long, the 2010s were the decade of Asisat Oshoala, whose fleetness of foot and movement in the box saw her rack up six CAF Player of the Year awards.
Each defined their era, but the 2020s have no obvious individual talisman. Part of that is down to the disruptions (COVID-19, CAF bungling) that have messed with the women’s football calendar over the last five years, but the result is that, for the first time in a while, Nigeria’s crown appears to be slipping. Not so much directly because of it, though, as it is because of the refusal to acknowledge it; this era of the Super Falcons is and should be defined, not by one, but by the collective.
The Super Falcons: A new team-driven paradigm
Up until Friday, the experience of watching the nine-time African champions at the ongoing WAFCON was a largely frustrating one. The incoherence to their play was off-putting, and was only exacerbated by an identity crisis: especially in the first halves of the opening two matches, it was a team set up almost entirely to service its most distinguished player.
How many goals have Nigeria scored tonight? 😁#TotalEnergiesWAFCON2024 pic.twitter.com/mqpzCcHSTC
— CAF Women’s Football (@CAFwomen) July 18, 2025
Both matches saw Oshoala substituted at the half, and subsequently the team played better, but still both times a sense of compromise persisted, even more so in the third match where a heavily rotated side sleepwalked its way to a goalless draw against Algeria.
The quarter-final against Zambia, however, witnessed for the first time Justin Madugu listening to what his squad was telling him. By rewarding the cameo performances of the likes of Esther Okoronkwo, Chinwendu Ihezuo and Jenniefer Echegini, and letting their talents point the way forward, the Super Falcons were at once liberated and controlled.
Zambia are far from a paragon of defensive rigour at the best of times, but some of the Super Falcons’ movement on the day was splendid: Rasheedat Ajibade and Folashade Ijamilusi dovetailing and swapping places, Okoronkwo dropping deep and Ihezuo exploiting the space in behind, Echegini occasionally covering deeper, but also drifting over the right channel to overload as necessary.
As Arsene Wenger once famously said, good players know how to play together; in this case, because none of them were princesses without the ball, they were seldom exposed on turnovers.
There will be sterner examinations, and the crunch will properly test Madugu’s commitment to this new collectivist ideal. However, he would do well to stick with it, not just because this is the direction of travel, but because, with no single game-breaking talent to defer to, a new era has ushered itself in: one in which the whole is necessarily greater than the sum of its parts.
