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Super Eagles captain William Troost-Ekong has thoroughly explained his decision to change his national allegiance from the Netherlands to Nigeria.
Ekong joined the Nigeria national team in 2015 after having a conversation with Super Eagles legend Stephen Keshi.
He made his debut for the Super Eagles, playing 90 minutes in an AFCON qualifying match against Chad.
He led the team to the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations, where he won the TotalEnergies Best Performer award and earned a spot on the Team of the Tournament.
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Ekong speaks on Nigeria and the Netherlands
In a recent episode of The Sports Afterparty Podcast, Troost-Ekong was asked to explain why he decided to travel to Nigeria rather than the Netherlands.
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He said, "I had the decision quite early in my career. I was 20 at the time, I just finished my breakthrough season in the Netherlands, first year of playing probably 30 plus games (22 games, ed) in the Eredivisie, which is the highest league in the Netherlands.
"And all of a sudden I got a phone call from Stephen Keshi, who was the coach at the time, ex-captain and ex-player, so I was quite blown away he called me.
"Just at the start of the season, I had played for the Dutch U19 and U20 squads, but there was no real perspective yet for the first team.
"When I had that call, it wasn't necessarily maybe in the same boat when you talk about Olise from Bayern Munich for example when he chose to play for France and he could have played for Nigeria, Algeria, England. He had all those options there on the table for him. This was the only tangible option that I had.
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“The choice was between trying to progress and later in my career maybe have a chance to play for the Netherlands or have a chance now to play for the Super Eagles who were kind of going through a transition stage where a lot of their defenders that time were a little bit older, so I knew that they wanted to make some changes there.
"And taking that opportunity which then in turn would give me more perspective for my club so I kind of made that decision thinking about all those things.
"I said yes very quickly because I thought if I can have a chance to become an international at 21 years old I probably have a good chance of making a career after if I do well."
The centre-defender decided to leave the Netherlands to join his father's native Nigeria, despite being able to choose the Dutch.
Meanwhile, the camp has officially opened, including captain Ekong, arriving ahead of their clash with Benin Republic and Rwanda.
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