Following their 5-0 trouncing of Werder Bremen in Sunday's Bundesliga action, Victor Boniface's Bayer Leverkusen have now confirmed their first domestic title.
Remarkably for a club that hasn't won major silverware in 21 years, ending Bayern's untrammelled ten-season run as German champions may not even be the high point of this campaign. Xabi Alonso's charges could end the season with multiple trophies (they are in the DFB Pokal final and also in the hunt for UEFA Europa League glory) and also have unbeaten status in all competitions to guard.
All that unprecedented success is down to outstanding contributions from all over the pitch, including the Nigerian duo of Boniface and Nathan Tella, who have both figured significantly in the splendid season Die Werkself are having.
And why not? They have become the first footballers from the West African country to be crowned kings of Germany in over two decades — only the third and fourth to receive that particular honour ever, in fact.
Read all about the first two below.
Pascal Ojigwe (Kaiserslautern, 1997/98)
The Aba-born defender/midfielder started and ended his playing career with hometown club Enyimba, but he spent all the intervening years in Germany, turning out for some fine sides and achieving great success.
The club Ojigwe first moved to was Kaiserslautern, in 1995, at a time when the Rhineland-Palatinate outfit were playing lower-tier football.
Two years later, promotion to the Bundesliga was secured, and, stunningly, in their very first season back, they won the title.
It was unprecedented then — no team freshly promoted had ever achieved such a feat — and, even now, it remains unrivalled. Victor Boniface's Bayer Leverkusen may be set to make history, but even they would not have achieved something quite as improbable.
Ojigwe did not feature prominently in that triumph — in fact, with just five minutes of football under his belt, he hardly featured at all — but he did just enough to earn a Bundesliga winners’ medal, becoming the very first Nigerian to receive one.
The 17-time capped Ojigwe came close to winning the league once more (again as a largely peripheral actor), in 2002, as part of a Leverkusen team that blew a comfortable advantage at the top of the table to miss out on the title on the final day, before incredibly finishing as runners-up in the DFB-Pokal and the UEFA Champions League that year.
Sunday Oliseh (Borussia Dortmund, 2001/02)
It was Borussia Dortmund that beat Leverkusen to the league title which would have been Ojigwe's second, and that class of victorious Schwarzgelben themselves had a defensive-minded Nigerian player in their ranks: Oliseh.
Oliseh had joined the club at the turn of the century after an underwhelming year in Italy with Juventus, looking to revive his career at a side that promised more opportunities than he had found in Turin.
And while Oliseh never quite became an undisputed regular in the famous yellow shirt, he certainly was a reliable squad player — the former Nigeria captain played in 18 games during that title-winning campaign, 11 of them as a starter, and contributed one goal from his position deep in midfield.
It would be only the second league title of Oliseh's career — the first of which was won a few years earlier at Ajax Amsterdam in the Netherlands — and it came in a month that Oliseh would otherwise not remember too fondly.
Just four days after the league was won, Dortmund fell to Feyenoord in the UEFA Cup final, but a more crushing blow would soon follow, when the outspoken Oliseh was left out of Nigeria's 2002 FIFA World Cup squad.
He'd retire from international football almost immediately, but that Bundesliga medal remains a valuable memento from such a gloomy period.
