Ikpeba: Super Falcons Are Always The Team To Beat At WAFCON

Victor Ikpeba has seen enough African football to know when a national team carries genuine pedigree into a continental tournament, and his verdict on the Super Falcons heading into WAFCON 2026 reflects exactly that depth of perspective. Speaking on SuperSport’s Monday Night Football broadcast, the former Super Eagles striker delivered an assessment of the defending champions that was as confident as it was specific, grounded in the reality of where Nigeria’s women’s footballers are performing across the global game rather than in a simple expression of national loyalty.

“We are always the team to beat,” Ikpeba said. His praise for the NFF followed, expressed through an acknowledgement of the Senegal double-header secured for June, which he welcomed as meaningful preparation given the difficulty Nigeria has faced in arranging high-quality warm-up opponents. “The NFF is clever enough; the Super Falcons are having two friendly matches against Senegal in Remo within three days. It is good to see our girls come back home and play friendly matches,” he said.

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The Squad Depth That Makes Nigeria Formidable

Ikpeba’s most substantive argument for Nigeria’s WAFCON favouritism was not about tactics or tournament experience, valuable as both are for a side with 11 titles. It was about the global distribution of talent that no other African women’s football programme can currently match. His description of the Super Falcons as a squad that is everywhere in Europe and America, and Nigeria as being “spoilt for choice” with players performing at the highest club levels, reflects a structural advantage that has been building across the past decade and is now paying its most significant dividends.

The evidence for Ikpeba’s assessment is visible across the clubs where Super Falcons players have performed in the 2025-26 season. Shukurat Oladipo won the Serie A Femminile Best Defender award at AS Roma after helping the Giallorossi to their third Italian women’s title. Chiamaka Nnadozie retained her CAF Women’s Goalkeeper of the Year award for the second consecutive year. Rasheedat Ajibade, Asisat Oshoala, and multiple other Falcons have been active in the Primera Iberdrola and other major women’s leagues across Europe. Not every African country, as Ikpeba noted, has the luxury of selecting from a pool of players active at that level of professional women’s football.

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A Note On The Preparation Concerns

Not everyone shares Ikpeba’s unqualified confidence in the NFF’s tournament preparation. The reader response to his SuperSport comments, as reflected in public football conversation, included pointed criticism from Nigerian fans who noted that the Senegal double-header represents only the second set of friendly matches the Super Falcons will have played in the ten months since their WAFCON triumph last July. The only other match in that period was a friendly against Cameroon, a figure that critics have described as inadequate for a defending champion with a title to protect at the highest women’s football level on the continent.

That criticism carries weight and deserves acknowledgement. High-quality preparation with regular international fixtures is how defending champions maintain the tactical sharpness and collective rhythm that tournament football demands. The Super Falcons’ talent depth gives them a foundation that most opponents cannot match, but talent alone does not automatically translate into the combination, pressing synchronisation, and tactical familiarity that come from playing together frequently. The Senegal matches in June will be valuable, but two games in three days is a compressed replacement for the more sustained preparation programme that would have given the coaching staff a longer read on squad combinations before Morocco.

The Ikpeba Credential Behind The Verdict

Victor Ikpeba’s opinion on Nigerian football carries a specific authority that commentary from outside the Super Eagles community cannot match. The former Monaco and Borussia Dortmund striker represented Nigeria at the 1994 and 1998 World Cups and across multiple Africa Cup of Nations tournaments, accumulating the kind of tournament experience at the highest level that gives his assessments of what it takes to win continental football a grounding in lived experience rather than observation alone. His role as a SuperSport analyst extends that credibility into regular public assessment of the game’s current state, and his familiarity with both the women’s and men’s sides of African football gives his WAFCON verdict the texture of someone who has followed the Super Falcons’ development through multiple cycles.

His specific framing — “not every African country has the pedigree of having their girls play abroad” — is the line that both validates and explains the Super Falcons’ favouritism. Pedigree is the operative word. Eleven WAFCON titles, a record that no other nation approaches, combined with a generation of players performing at Serie A, Primera Iberdrola, WSL, and Division 1 Féminine level, creates a combination of institutional knowledge and current quality that is genuinely difficult to replicate across the full 24 days of a WAFCON tournament.

What Morocco Needs To Produce

For the Super Falcons to arrive in Morocco in late July and successfully defend their title, three things need to go right across the months that remain. The Senegal friendlies in June need to give the coaching staff clear answers about their best starting eleven and their most reliable tactical combinations. The squad members active in European and American club football need to arrive at the tournament in good physical condition with their seasons ended cleanly rather than disrupted by late injuries. And the collective belief that carried Nigeria through their 2024 WAFCON campaign, including the dramatic 3-2 comeback against Morocco in the final, needs to translate from the memory of that achievement into the hunger to repeat it.

Ikpeba’s confidence suggests he believes all three of those conditions can be met. As reported by FootballInNigeria.com.ng, the consensus among Nigerian football observers heading into WAFCON 2026 aligns broadly with Ikpeba’s assessment, even if the concerns about preparation frequency are real and valid. The Super Falcons are the defending champions, the eleven-time winners, and the squad with the deepest pool of European-based players on the continent. That combination makes them the team to beat, precisely as Ikpeba said. Whether the title comes home from Morocco depends on how well the preparation delivers the remaining pieces of the puzzle. Fans backing the Super Falcons through the tournament can also use the Bet9ja outright betting page for WAFCON 2026 odds and tournament offers.