African soccer is at a crossroads. It has a rich history that is often forgotten, ignored or misconstrued by wealthier parts of the world. On the one hand, the problems of an underresourced, chronically exploited and, frankly, corrupt ecosystem of local soccer leagues and governing bodies are real. On the other hand, there is an array of undeniable African talent playing in the world’s top leagues, a fervent fan base and a long list of historic local clubs who have been playing for more than a century.
Most worldwide soccer fans know the names of famous African players but would have a much harder time recognizing the names of the top clubs in the African countries in which those players were born. The Club World Cup saw four African teams testing themselves against some of the best clubs from around the world: South Africa’s Mamelodi Sundowns, Morocco’s Wydad Casablanca, Tunisia’s Esperance Sportive de Tunis and the continent’s most successful club of all time, Egypt’s Al Ahly.
Despite having to fly halfway around the world to participate, with many of its fans fearing America’s more hostile immigration policies and amid uncertainty fueled by the Trump administration, Al Ahly still managed to fill stadiums for its matches.
“It’s like we were playing in Cairo, and that was a surprise for me in my first official match with Al Ahly,” Jose Riveiro, the club’s new head coach, said at the time. “To be here in the States and have it like you were playing at home is something that can probably only happen in this [club].”
Nevertheless, all four African clubs failed to move past the group stage. Clubs like Al Ahly came into the tournament with a financial disadvantage compared to every team they faced. In the group stage, European and South American clubs are paid more simply for showing up. According to the Swiss Ramble, a soccer newsletter, Portuguese team Porto received $22 million in participation fees, Brazil’s Palmeiras received $15.2 million and Al Ahly and local team Inter Miami received $9.6 million. Larger European teams get even more, with English Premier League team Manchester City earning $38.2 million in participation fees alone.
To be fair, the fees paid out by FIFA, soccer’s governing body, are somewhat egalitarian by modern standards. If we analyze European, South American and African teams in terms of annual revenue and take into account their local competitions, sponsorship revenues, broadcasting deals, commercial opportunities and merchandising, then European clubs like Manchester City make roughly 33 times more money than Al Ahly each year.
This gap has been trending upward. The latest Deloitte Money League, an annual ranking of soccer clubs by revenue generation, estimated that Real Madrid made over $1.16 billion in revenue during the 2023-24 season, while Manchester City made over $970 million and Paris Saint-Germain earned over $935 million. Even within the top five European leagues, there is a growing inequality between clubs that participate in the ever-expanding and lucrative continental competitions run by UEFA, Europe’s soccer governing body, and the clubs that now get relegated every time they come up in those leagues. Historic European giants Ajax and Benfica have been left behind due to their smaller league sizes in the Netherlands and Portugal.
If even smaller clubs in European countries can’t compete with the growing financial inequality, how can Al Ahly, Mamelodi Sundowns, Wydad Casablanca and Esperance de Tunis even compete? The combined annual revenue of all four clubs would not be enough to sign a Real Madrid star player, much less pay his wages.
As soccer fans, we have it backward. We expect great players to make great teams, when it’s quite often the opposite. A rich soccer club in a great soccer league attracts great players and coaches. Africa might have the natural talent, but that’s where the fairy tale ends. The system is built for exporting to wealthier “developed” nations, where the “raw” player will be developed into a finished product. Old-school colonial and economic power rules.
Liverpool hero and Egypt’s national team captain Mohamed Salah just won the Premier League title, the player of the season award, the golden boot for top goalscorer and playmaker of the season as he broke the record for combined goals and assists in a Premier League season, at times single-handedly dragging Liverpool to the title. At the national level, however, having arguably one of the world’s greatest ever footballers was not enough: The Egyptian national team has never won a match in a World Cup, failing to qualify in 2022. The upcoming tournament in 2026 will likely be the last chance for the team to play with Salah at his peak.
Nigeria, which has numerous players in Europe’s top leagues, failed to qualify for the World Cup in Qatar and is still fighting to qualify now for the next tournament in 2026. The team includes world champion players from the 2013 and 2015 under-17 FIFA World Cups, but their talents have been wasted.
A pleasant departure from this is Morocco. The national team captain, Achraf Hakimi, is widely accepted as the best right-back in soccer. He scored the opener in the most recent UEFA Champions League final for Paris Saint-Germain, a team he vice-captained to a historic quadruple — UEFA Champions League, French league and cup and the Trophee des Champions.
He also led Morocco in 2022 when it became the first African nation in history to reach the semifinal of a FIFA World Cup. In my view, Morocco’s run in Qatar was no accident: It has just as much to do with off-the-field strategy, long-term investment and political willpower as it does the team’s great players.
Since 2006, Morocco has taken a series of strategic steps that have led it to this point. Ayoub Cherrai, the technical director of Prestigia Football Club Casablanca told me that a key inflection point was two decades ago, when the country’s monarch, King Mohammed VI, made it a point to fund and develop soccer at the grassroots level. “Here in Morocco, our King has instructed everyone to prioritize soccer development as a matter of national importance and pride,” he said. “Our national academy centre now is better or at least at the same level as Clairefontaine in France.”
Cherrai agrees that African soccer has a lot of talent, but for him, the difference between African countries with historically great soccer — such as Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Cameroon and South Africa — and the rest of the continent is that there is either a lack of strategy, resources or political will to fund soccer. As a result, many academies are underresourced, or the ones that do a great job are funded by European clubs with an objective to extract players and make a profit.
Morocco has made five unsuccessful bids to host the World Cup, a key aspect of the royal agenda under the previous king, Hassan II, as well as his son. Although those bids were rejected, the kingdom, in the process, built six FIFA-accredited stadiums, invested in a world-class youth training center, inaugurated in 2009, developed a women’s national team and hired international coaches. The effort culminated in hosting the Club World Cup in 2013.
Perhaps one of the most impactful steps Morocco has taken is to finally remedy the fact that Africa, until 2018, had no professional-level continental coaching license or curriculum. That has changed as Morocco launched the Confederation of African Football (CAF) professional coaching license in 2018. In its inaugural cohort, 25 coaches from around the continent were invited to study and receive this qualification. Notably, among its list of graduates is Walid Regragui, the current Morocco national team coach, who led the team in its historic World Cup run in Qatar.
In 2021, South African billionaire and Mamelodi Sundowns club owner Patrice Motsepe was elected president of CAF, African soccer’s governing body. He inherited a soccer federation in deep financial trouble.
The previous president, Ahmad Ahmad, was banned from FIFA for misappropriating funds. His regime saw CAF’s liabilities rise above $157 million, while cash reserves declined from $131 million in 2016 to just under $20 million in the 2021-22 accounting year. CAF was losing money every year at an alarming rate. Yet there was very little to show for it around the African continent in terms of soccer investment.
In an interview with the BBC, Veron Mosengo-Omba, the secretary general of CAF, said: “Motsepe and his executive coming in was, for me, a gift for African football. In 2021, CAF was a toxic company — nobody trusted CAF. When Motsepe came, he put the principle of good governance and integrity in all levels of the organisation.”
Motsepe, unlike many politicians, has no financial interest in leading an organization like CAF. He is already Africa’s ninth-richest person, having become the first Black partner at a South African law firm in 1994, before founding and amassing a fortune with his publicly listed mining company and, later, equity investment firm. He serves on the board of trustees at the World Economic Forum. If anything, being involved with CAF and its bad reputation could have actually done more harm than good to his image.
Motsepe bought Mamelodi Sundowns in 2003, a club he still owns and has committed significant resources to over two decades, during which it overtook Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates as the most successful soccer club in South Africa. Mamelodi Sundowns has won 15 league titles and, in 2016, the African Champions League. What’s more, the women’s team won the African Champions League in 2021, the first African club and only the third club in the world to win both a men’s and women’s continental competition.
It appears that having Motsepe as the current CAF president is a step in the right direction for African soccer. In his short tenure so far, he has successfully halved CAF’s debts and turned its finances around, from hemorrhaging money to recording its first annual profit.
In January 2024, the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) tournament held in Ivory Coast broke the record for viewership figures, attracting interest from new markets and setting CAF up for more lucrative commercial deals in the near future.
Corruption in soccer is rampant at all levels of the game and is, of course, not only an African problem. In many ways, South America is a mirror image, plagued with similar issues. The demise of the Brazilian national team is just one example of how malpractice off the pitch can affect teams’ performance. In 2012, the then-president of Brazil’s Football Federation, Ricardo Teixeira, was forced out due to allegations of bribery and other financial irregularities. He was later exposed in 2015 by the FBI’s investigation into FIFA, and it was only at this point that Brazilian local authorities intervened and accused him of using the Brazilian national team as his personal cash cow.
The badly organized Copa America last year, where teams arrived at training camps without pitches, also showed that the leadership of CONMEBOL, the governing body of South American soccer, has its issues.
Part of the problem is that the game’s power structures benefit from keeping poor nations dependent on financial aid, to secure their votes for policies and elections. In 2015, FIFA itself was found guilty of several cases of corruption, embezzlement and misappropriation of funds.
Soccer is often a mirror of the societies we live in. In African soccer, financial underdevelopment, a colonial history of exploitation and local mismanagement — despite an abundance of raw talent — are nothing new. Since the FIFA under-17 World Cup was established in 1985, no team has been more successful than Nigeria, which has won five editions of the tournament. Yet this has hardly translated into success at the senior level.
Former international player Efe Ambrose made 51 appearances for Nigeria, having won the AFCON in 2013. He is perhaps more widely known for winning four league titles and two cups with Scottish club Celtic. What sets him apart from other Nigerian international players who have grown up in Europe is that he actually rose through the local Nigerian Premier Football League first, winning the title with Bayelsa United in 2009, before winning the Nigeria Federation Cup with Kaduna United in 2010.
In four years, Ambrose went from playing for his local club in Nigeria to playing regularly in the UEFA Champions League and marking Lionel Messi in the 2014 World Cup.
Ambrose says that, since Brexit, the U.K. has become less open to bringing in young foreign players. In turn, players whose parents originated abroad have been increasingly opting to play for their countries of origin.
This trend of European-born players of African descent choosing to represent the teams of their parental lineage is also quite evident in France, the country I chose to emigrate to when I left the African continent in search of soccer opportunities in Europe. Statistics from the last AFCON tournament back this up. Of the 660 players who were registered to play in the tournament, 200 players (more than 30%) were not born on the African continent but were the children or grandchildren of African immigrants, with 104 of them born in France, 24 in Spain and 15 in England.
The tiny island of Cape Verde unexpectedly appeared on the scene as a serious contender during the AFCON, with several talented players now choosing to play for the national team instead of representing Portugal, the island’s former colonial power. Cape Verde is currently top of its qualifying group and is on track to qualify for its first World Cup in history.
In the past, players born in Portugal of Cape Verdean descent, such as former Manchester United star Nani, would be deprived of making this choice, since Portugal was clearly the smarter career option. But the tides are turning, and there’s a reason that many players, beyond just Cape Verde, are making this choice. The national sides that have improved their facilities, administration and coaches are starting to find it easier to convince great players to represent their parents’ countries.
Critics will argue that some of these 200 players would not make the national team in European countries and so chose to represent a country where they saw an easier path to international soccer or stardom. But that is only one of many complex reasons why a player would identify with their heritage. Political and socioeconomic conditions also play a role. There are many well-documented cases of football players being subjected to racial abuse in Italy, Spain, Germany, France and the U.K.
Over the last decade, Europe has seen growing anti-immigrant sentiment, with far-right parties gaining dizzying momentum. I live in Lyon, one of the epicenters of Marine Le Pen’s political party, the National Rally, and can sadly confirm that I have encountered football ultras here that strongly identify with its nationalistic views, with one casually letting me know that they identify as a neo-fascist.
Local players are adored and embraced by the local ultras so long as they perform well on the pitch, but as soon as a player’s performance drops, they will likely experience racial abuse. Most footballers come from low-income or working-class backgrounds and have grown up experiencing firsthand how society has mistreated their immigrant parents and curtailed their personal and professional aspirations. Is it that surprising, then, that a talented footballer who grows up in a nation where they are bombarded with racist abuse would elect to play for their parents’ national team?
Hakimi was born in Spain but elected to represent Morocco. Alex Iwobi was born in London but chose Nigeria. Kalidou Koulibaly represented France at the youth level, and was earmarked for an important role in the French national team, but chose to play for Senegal. Many other players born in France have elected to represent the national teams of Senegal, Mali, Congo and Algeria.
While I see this significant shift as a way to address the previous talent drain that the African continent was experiencing, Ambrose, the Nigerian footballer, said that such players often perform much better for their European soccer clubs than their national teams.
“When I played for Nigeria, I knew I had to perform for my people. If I played badly, I would feel bad for the supporters as some of them come from my town. They know my family and where I grew up. Now I see players in the national team choosing not to play because they are worried about their club’s paycheck or that they might get an injury whilst playing for the national team,” he said.
Nigeria has qualified for six of the last eight World Cups but missed out in 2022 and is at serious risk of falling short of qualifying for the 2026 tournament, when many expect the players who won the under-17 World Cup 10 years ago to be reaching their peak. Ambrose remains hopeful that they will find a way to perform and qualify, arguing that there are still playoff spots up for grabs.
An extensive soccer talent development study conducted by FIFA, called the Increasing Global Competitiveness report, shows that at the international youth level, CAF teams are the second most successful globally. Yet at the senior level, our teams normally fall well below those from Europe and South America.
The key differentiator here is the role that coaching, tactics and training play in adequately preparing talented youth players to succeed when they reach senior level. At the international youth level it is normal to see Nigeria or Ghana defeating European youth teams, but at the senior level, it took 22 attempts for an African men’s team to defeat England in a soccer match — a 3-1 victory for Senegal last month. Senegal’s Moussa Niakhaté and starting goalkeeper Edouard Mendy were born in France but have chosen to represent the West African country. Senegal’s team is currently in the playoff spot for World Cup qualification.
We are clearly seeing a shift when it comes to the performance of numerous African teams on the world stage. Morocco’s run to the World Cup semifinals was a watershed moment in African soccer, and I fully expect many other talented African teams to carry the baton and give a good showing in the World Cup next year. Many deep-rooted organizational problems still need to be addressed, however, and it is extremely urgent that the national soccer federations and their ruling governments align their goals and agree on strategic, clear and achievable plans to turn this momentum into a lasting success. Much is still needed to improve the infrastructure, training programs, grassroots investment and salaries of coaches, players, referees and other stakeholders in the local game.
African soccer has long languished in the shadow of Europe’s far richer clubs, which plundered the continent’s star players. But a slew of changes, including a new chief executive of the African football federation, increased spending on youth academies, and star players rekindling their attachment to their homelands, puts us at the cusp of a transformational moment in the continent’s history.
The next few years could see a continuation of mismanagement and wasted opportunity — or, if soccer federations can show strong leadership and support, then the current momentum could lead us into a golden age of African soccer.
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