Nigeria ranked above Ghana, Ivory Coast for number of foreign footballers

Nigeria has been ranked as the African country with the most expatriates in football in the World ahead of Ghana and the Ivory Coast.

Pulse Sports Nigeria can report that Nigeria has been ranked ninth in the world out of 100 associations.

This comes from the latest issue of the CIES Football Observatory ranking of the 100 associations with the highest number of expatriates in the world.

In their weekly issue made public on Wednesday and monitored by Pulse Sports, Nigeria was ranked ninth with a total of 385 players outside their association.

This placed Nigeria ahead of the likes of Ghana with 318 footballers, Ivory Coast with 227 and Senegal with 211.

A breakdown of Nigeria’s numbers according to different age grades shows that about 153 of the players are aged 23 years old or under.

145 of them are between the ages of 23-26, 57 are aged between 27-30 while there are 30 football players aged 30 years and above from Nigeria.

In terms of the country with the highest in the world, five-time FIFA World Cup winners, Brazil, came out tops.

The Samba nation has a total of 1289 expatriates, closely followed by France with 1033 football players.

Argentina (905), England (535), and Spain (458) complete the top five. Other countries in the top ten bracket include Colombia (448), Germany (446), Croatia (407), Nigeria (385) and Serbia (380) players.