BREAKING: NFF explains why Falconets were stranded at Istanbul airport

Image: Peoples Gazette

The Nigeria Football Federation has explained to Nigerians the reasons the Nigerian Falconets and their officials were stranded at the Istanbul Airport.

The NFF General Secretary, Dr. Mohammed Sanusi, clarified in a statement on Wednesday that so many factors contributed to the delays that the team and officials experienced at the Turkish airport.

The statement read: “The NFF did not book the team’s tickets from Costa Rica; FIFA did. FIFA also did not envisage the hitches that saw the team delayed for more than three hours in Bogota and another one hour in Panama. By the time the team got to Istanbul, the flight to Abuja had left.

“Our officials pleaded for compassionate transit visas so as to take the players and officials to a hotel inside the town, but this was not possible as they were informed that Nigeria had been removed from the list of countries whose citizens were issued visa-on-arrival in Turkey. The airline then took the team to a sleeping area at the airport and gave them tickets to have meals every five hours. This situation has nothing to do with NFF, who had made arrangements to receive the team in Abuja before the complications in travel arrangements.”

According to him, the NFF had implored the world football governing body, FIFA, to intervene with the Embassy of Germany to issue the team transit visas before their departure from Nigeria so that the team could travel through Germany, adding that “this did not happen.”

On the issue of body wear, Sanusi said, “The players were handed three sets of green jerseys and two sets of white jerseys, several house-wear types and training jerseys. The players opted to wash only their jersey top (no other stuff) because when the first set of body wear was sent to the laundry people at the hotel, it returned with some FIFA and NFF badges at the front and names at the back peeled by the machine.”

Source:punchng.com

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