With a record 10 African teams at the first 48-nation World Cup finals tournament, the big question, after Morocco’s historic semi-final appearance in Qatar, is whether any of them can go a step further.
The prospect of an African side becoming world champions appeared realistic after Cameroon defied the odds to beat Diego Maradona’s Argentina, the defending champions, in the opening game of the 1990 tournament and embarked on a fairytale run that ended in a 3-2 quarter-final defeat by England. But in the eight subsequent World Cups, African teams have been long on promise and short on delivery.
Pelé, the sport’s all-time great, predicted: “An African nation will win the World Cup before the year 2000.” That we are still waiting is not down to a lack of talent but a consequence of self-inflicted governance wounds, as Joseph‑Antoine Bell, a goalkeeper in Cameroon’s 1982, 1990 and 1994 World Cup squads, bluntly puts it.
“Our football is not really improving … we don’t challenge ourselves to be excellent,” says Bell, one of the continent’s most articulate football minds and a trenchant critic of Africa’s underperformance. “Before the 1960s, Africa already had good players in Europe, which means that we are not lacking players. What have we won at the World Cup? Now that the tournament has been increased to 48 teams, we are dull enough to think we have more chances to win?
“When the World Cup was being staged in 2010, some people were saying that because the tournament was in Africa an African team would win it. Rubbish. As far as winning [the World Cup] is concerned, we are not getting more chances.”
Algeria, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia will represent Africa this summer, with Cameroon and Nigeria notable absentees. “Many see Cameroon as the pacesetter in African football but Morocco are the real leaders, as they were the first to reach the second round of the World Cup [in 1986] and the first to reach the semi-final in Qatar,” Bell says.
“I think they will be the best chance for Africa at this World Cup with Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire and perhaps Egypt, which seems to be consistent in qualifying. If you’re there every time and you improve each time, you can hope to go further.
But we need to remind all of them that going beyond the first round can no longer be the target, because the first round, when there are 48 teams, is not the same as when we had 32 teams. The target is winning [the World Cup], and the distance [to the trophy] is no longer the same.”
What has not changed is the off-field drama, the tragicomedy of errors, among several African countries going to the tournament, which is a damning testament to the incompetence of football federations supposed to put the continent’s best foot forward.
Pape Thiaw, Senegal’s head coach, initially refused to board the plane in Dakar taking the team to the World Cup, in protest at the failure of the Senegal football federation to pay several months’ wages and at working without a contract since it expired after he led the team to the Africa Cup of Nations final in January. It took the last-minute intervention of the Senegalese government to resolve the impasse.
“Becoming the best team, the best country in the world means that you have good players, a good coach, good staff but it also means you must have good governance to support you,” Bell says. “The entire package must be right. When your team comes from a country where they forget to pay the salary of the coach, and you say you want to win the World Cup, that is an insult to the rest of the world, where people really work hard to get things right. We have to start by being serious.
“It takes much more than footballers to be the world champions: it takes people, it takes managers, who think with their heads, before players come to the field to play with their feet.”
Beyond the uncertain fortune of Africa’s teams, the inability of thousands of fans from the qualified nations to get travel visas has left a sour taste of exclusion from what is supposed to be an inclusive event. “The absence of the colourful, exuberant African spectators, because of the difficulty of travel, the cost of everything and difficulty of visas to go to the United States is coming into play,” says Segun Odegbami, the former Nigeria captain and 1980 Afcon winner.
“I have been waiting for 14 months to get a date to attend an interview [at the US embassy in Abuja] … I am not a first-time visitor. I have cancelled the possibility of going.”
Given that Odegbami was in the US for the 1994 World Cup as the Super Eagles’ administrative manager, his situation is profoundly striking. But he refuses to be pessimistic about what the next five weeks could mean for Africa’s World Cup scorecard. “We have passed the stage of just being participants, to being competitors and contenders in the top four. We are knocking on the door.”
Opening that door to the final – and the trophy – when games are won by the smallest of margins, and exhibiting a high level of professionalism, is the great challenge. But nothing would make the continent’s 1.5 billion people happier than to have a stake in the match at the MetLife Stadium on 19 July.
