Nigeria’s Qatar 2022 world cup defeat to Ghana and their lack of emotional intelligence

The Qatar 2022 world cup defeat Ghana handed the Super Eagles and the Nigerian football fans will be a nightmare they will want to forget quickly, but more seriously, the win by the Ghana Black Stars revealed the biggest weakness of the Nigerian soccer fans. The teaming and intimidating spectators on the day lacked emotional intelligence to the minute level.

In sports, all stakeholders need emotional intelligence and the Nigerian fans need to learn and acquire a lot of it going forward. Sports emotional intelligence is not the preserved requirement for footballers, managers and the technical team. It is also important that supporters or fans of clubs and national teams also possess this quality and skill.

Nigeria after losing their world cup ambitions to Ghana who beat them via the away goal rule was never what they expected. The entire nation knew they had brought Ghana to the slaughterhouse. Just before the referee blasted his final whistle, the losing home team supporters decided to display a high level of lack of emotional intelligence in sports on the day.

Sports and emotional intelligence cannot be separated if you are to be in the right frame of mind. The destruction of their sports facilities and other violent acts they perpetrated was uncalled-for if they had tamed their emotions a bit rather, they decided to teach their beautiful stadium built with their own taxes a lesson.

Although they expressed their strongest emotions as a result of the ties they have with the Super Eagles, the violent behaviour cannot be scored on a scale of 1 to 10. Violence among football fans is perceived to be an expression that may help to reinforce a supporter’s sense of identity.

On the night, Nigeria lost to a better well organized, and determined team. At home, Ghana played their hearts out and sent a strong signal to the Nigerians, especially when the Super Eagles failed to score an away goal in Ghana during the first leg on 25th March 2022.

In Nigeria on 29th, of the 60,000 fans who parked in the stadium had over 95% were Nigerian supporters.  The fans at the Abiola stadium decided to display their weakness and lack of will to accept the defeat gloriously. They needed to recognize their own emotional state before, during, and after the match, that is how you are feeling at any point in time as a result of the football match, being able to sense the emotions in others, knowing how to motivate yourself to create your best performance and to accept the outcome of the game. Sports emotional intelligence is critical to the success of teams and the Nigerian fans need it badly.

Football fans just like the Nigerians have their emotions being triggered by the game and the reward attached to the game increases the emotional distress yet, you must be able to keep yourself in check.

The truth is, men are more stressed when it has to do with sports and may be violent as a result. When the testosterone of a close game like the world cup playoff between Ghana and Nigeria meets the limbic system, it will surely trigger a faux “fight or flight response”. This happened more to the Nigerians on the day, and it further heightened their emotions “The interaction of emotion, stressful scenarios, and physiological enhancement commonly results in crying,” Farkas says. But Nigerians did not only cry, they were heartbroken to the core and resorted to destroying of state sports facilities, attacking the Ghanaian fans at the stadium just after the match.

Within the context of organized sports, membership manifests in team identification (Bryant et al., 1981; Zillmann et al., 1989). Accordingly, the theory posits that the emotional reactions elicited by a sporting event are a function of that event’s content and the spectator’s feelings towards the team. The stakes were high over the two-leg playoff, and Ghana peppered Nigerians right before their own eyes.

Sports emotional intelligence is important because watching a sports match can stress your heart just as much as playing the game itself, suggests a small new study in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology.

Football is associated with passion, emotion, excitement, and dedication across Europe. References to extreme emotional experiences at football games characteriZed all aspects of discussions with fans — some referring to the ‘pure joy’ and exhilaration of being at football games.

Well, according to The New York Times, “fervent fans become so tied to their teams that they experience hormonal surges and other physiological changes while watching games, much as the athletes do.” People become so tied up in all of it that they feel very high, and every low, that their favourite team experiences.

The supporters of the Super Eagles will live with the pain forever, but the flawed emotional intelligence they displayed will hunt their football even much more for a very long time. The Super Eagles broke the Nigerian hearts and will be losing many of their fans for some time because the loss weakened their emotional intelligence to the core.

Sports emotional intelligence: Why Nigerian football fans lost their emotional intelligence after Ghana beat them to book a place at the 2022 World cup in Qatar.

#1 The importance of the result at its implication given that it was a world cup playoff and a win for Nigeria meant another world cup participation. The rivalry between Ghana and Nigeria in football is at its highest point now, and every one of the teams wanted to make it to the world cup. The victory will come with money, position in the FIFA world ranking, a chance to play at the Qatar 2022 world cup, and give one team bragging rights. No wonder the Nigerian fans could not stand the humiliation and the troll after the defeat.

#2 The chants at the stadium were deafening, and the Nigerians parked the slaughterhouse hoping to humiliate the Ghanaian team with a goal harvest at home. Alas, Ghana escaped and hurt Nigerian pride. The crowd chanting abuse, ‘sledging’ by other players on the field of play was all in favour of Nigeria on the day, but they lost and that shook their emotional intelligence.

READ: Nigeria pretend to be big boys but they’re our little babies’ – GFA boss Kurt Okraku

#3 On the day, poor spectator behaviour including verbal abuse, emotional abuse, vandalism, invasion of the playing arena, intimidation and threatened or actual violence on the day showed that Nigerian fans lost their emotional intelligence.

#4 On that day, the Nigerian fans lost it all as they did not know how to behave. They become insensitive and because their Emotional intelligence was down, they did not know the right thing to say. The fans failed to comprehend appropriate behaviour worth the moment as the entire world was watching the West African Elclassico between Ghana and Nigeria with the world cup ticket at stake. Sad to say that, since they were able to interpret and appropriately respond to the emotional tone and atmosphere, they screwed up.

#5  The reaction of the Nigerian supporters suggests that they blame others for their problems (failure of the Eagles to beat Ghana and hence missed the world cup) Football fans with low EQ do not often have a better insight as to the problems their uncontrolled negative emotions can cause them and everybody. On the day, the fans failed to hold themselves accountable for their actions and because their emotions were clouded by the team’s failure, they felt they needed to destroy things to square up for the team’s failure.

READ: Ghana attacker Daniel-Kofi Kyereh maintains scoring form in St Pauli win ahead of World Cup playoff against Nigeria

#6 Nigerian football fans displayed the highest improper EQ on the night when the Super Eagles failed to fly above the Black stars. They displayed low and poor Coping Skills. The inability to cope with emotionally-charged situations can be an indicator of low EQ. For persons with poor emotional intelligence, strong emotions, whether their own or others’, are difficult to grasp. To avoid having to cope with the emotional aftermath, these people will typically walk away from these situations. It’s also fairly typical for people to hide their genuine feelings.

We all have to deal with emotions and disappointments as football fans, but to lose the total EQ is not the best we can offer ourselves, the team and other stakeholders of the game. On the day Ghana silences Nigerian to book a place at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, Nigerian fans failed to control their Emotional Outburst and allow it to fly freely and unmanaged. As a sports fan or a lover of football, if you cannot have the skill to regulate your emotions, then you are not emotionally intelligent. Football fans need to comprehend and control their emotions when they win or loose matches. You cannot win all the time, unless you are a greedy person who thinks you must always win no matter what.

So on the 29th of March 2022, Nigerian fans lashed out reactively without understanding what they were really feeling or why they are so upset. In fact, they seemed overblown and uncontrollable. A small country with 31 million people called Ghana had the gut to cut them into pieces and shatter their dreams.

Whatever the pain, the unexpected loss, Nigerian fans need to put themselves together and rally behind Ghana and the four other African representatives as we prepare for Qatar. The Ghana V Nigerian Jollof war will not end soon. Nigeria, hold your self together. You cannot always win, learn to develop your Sports emotional intelligence and do not behave like the South Africans who are still nursing their bitter experiences.