Nigeria captain attacks BBC 'politics' over exclusion of Nigerian players in Africa awards list

Super Eagles captain Ahmed Musa has questioned the absence of Nigerian players from the BBC African Footballer of the Year award nominees list.

The Al-Nassr of Saudi Arabia striker claims Super Eagles deserved to be considered in the list for qualifying and exhibiting good football at the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia.

The former Leicester City winger describes the decision to leave out his countrymen as political but hopes the younger generation will do more to break the jinx.

''I saw the list and I felt unhappy because when you see the players that are on the list, they are not even up to standard with what we did at the World Cup,'' he was quoted by aoifootball.com.

''So it's the politics of the game, so we don’t have to think about that. Now we have a lot of young players doing well, so hopefully, we will get our name there.''

The nominees for the BBC African Footballer of the Year award are Medhi Benatia (Morocco), Kalidou Koulibaly (Senegal), Sadio Mane (Senegal), Thomas Partey (Ghana) and Mohamed Salah (Egypt).