As Nigeria continues to lose avalanche of opportunities to have young Nigerian-born talented players to foreign countries due to their place of birth, concerned former Super Eagles centre-back, Sam Sodje, has vowed to resist his godson, Tai Sodje, from playing for the English national team.

With 17 goals in 16 matches for Manchester City U-18s, Sodje is the outright leading scorer in this season’s U-18 Premier League, and it’s only a matter of time before the English Football Association hand him a call-up to one of their youth teams. In truth, the Anglo-Nigerian wonderkid is leading towards representing England now as he was born and raised in the country and has friends in the Young Lions setup.

“He’s my godson, I speak to him every time and I have told him how special it is for him to play for Nigeria and I ‘m sure he loves to play for Nigeria. “All I want to do is sometime bring him to Nigeria, visit Nigeria, visit the national team and see how passionate the fans are and I’m sure he’ll buy into it. “He’s fully Nigerian, but the mom is English, so he has a chance to play for England.

But my own view is that Nigeria is going to be his destination, hopefully,” he revealed. “Tai’s mom is English, his dad is Nigerian, he’s got uncles who played for Nigeria,” Sam Sodje disclosed. “It’s different for Tai, he has never been to Nigeria while I grew up in Nigeria even though I was born in London, I knew I was going to play for Nigeria.

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“When it comes to Tai, all Tai talks about is he has been brought up in England, but he’s got uncles and his dad is Nigerian, so he’s got a big part of him that he’s Nigerian.

It would be recalled that Sam Sodje’s sibling, Efe, was a member of the Super Eagles squad to the 2002 World Cup and started matches against Argentina and England during the tournament in Asia.