Nigeria has won all seven previous third place playoff games they have competed in since their first in the 1978 finals in Ghana.
Technically, they were also third at the 1976 finals in Ethiopia, where the last four played a round-robin group competition to decide the winner, which was Morocco with Guinea second and Nigeria third and Egypt fourth.
There was no actual final nor third place play-off game, with the final positions determined by points after each team had played each other.
Therefore, their total of eight bronze medals is untouched in Cup of Nations history.
On Saturday, at Stade Mohamed V in Casablanca, they will be taking on Egypt for third place again after both sides lost narrowly in Wednesday’s semi-finals.
Egypt also has a strong record in the third-place playoff match, although they last competed for bronze back in 1984 when Algeria beat them in Abidjan.
It will be the fifth time that Egypt participates in the bronze medal match, winning three of them.
The Cup of Nations first introduced the game at the 1962 edition, which was hosted in Ethiopia and won by the home nation with Tunisia finishing third.
Nigeria has far and away the best record, with the Super Eagles finishing third for three tournaments in a row between 2002 and 2006 and then again in 2010.
Côte d’Ivoire has been third four times in the past, and Zambia three times.
Some of the past bronze medal matches were thrilling encounters, like when 1972 hosts Cameroon thrashed Zaire 5-2 in Yaoundé with all the goals coming in the first half, or the 1998 third place play-off in Ouagadougou when hosts Burkina Faso squandered a three-goal lead with four minutes to go and lost on post-match penalties.
In 2021, hosts Cameroon and Burkina Faso played out a dramatic six-goal epic before the Indomitable Lions won on penalties.
Only twice has a third place play-off match ended goalless, first in 2015 when hosts Equatorial Guinea were pipped by the Democratic Republic of Congo on post-match penalties, and then again at the last edition where South Africa edged the Leopards.