My route from Charlotte, North Carolina to Entebbe, Uganda took 36 hours. There were less expensive and more efficient ways to make the journey, but the itinerary was necessarily long. A discovered inability to sleep on airplanes took its toll. I landed in the country of my father for the first time fatigued, dehydrated, and unshowered. Nevertheless, my cousin David—with whom I would live for two weeks—warmly greeted me and we made our way from Entebbe to Mukono, a municipality outside the capital city of Kampala.
Memories upon reaching my cousin’s residence are scant. I remember showering, walking upstairs to the guest bedroom, shouting for water, drinking, then waking the next morning to the sound of roosters. I searched my bags for deodorant and found nothing—presumably lost in Doha or London. After making the oversight known, David and I went to pick deodorant and other miscellany from a local shop.
Driving to the store the topic of conversation was remittances. The particulars will remain in the car, but the central discussion was how African families across the continent are reliant on members forging lives abroad and sending money back home. Our discussion took such primacy that between traveling, talking, and shopping we forgot to buy an ice cream for my niece—an unfortunate broken promise. I penned “remittances” in my notes and thought little of it until reaching my family’s village in Teso. There the conversation assumed concrete meaning.
According to the United Nations, over $100 billion was sent from the African diaspora to the African continent in 2022. The figure represents roughly six percent of Africa’s economy per year. Access to remittances can determine a family’s trajectory. Returned resources help pay for constructing homes, agricultural projects, school fees, healthcare, and any number of expenses. They mitigate—to the extent possible—certain realities of the African experience.
My village stay lasted five days. We returned to Mukono on Thursday and I fell sick. Friday and Saturday were hopeless. France and Germany played the U-17 FIFA World Cup final in Indonesia that Saturday. I missed the match but watched the replay. It ended with penalties.
The hero was Borussia Dortmund youngster Almugera Kabar. The left-back cooly slotted his spot kick and won Germany their first U-17 World Cup. His surname “Kabar” was one I couldn’t place—it certainly wasn’t German—so I used Airtel’s overpriced data to learn more. Kabar’s parents are Libyan. That sent me through the complete U-17 Germany squad. The team had players with Libyan, Nigerian, Bissau-Guinean, Burkinabe, and Moroccan heritage.
Youth football is precarious when discussing elite nations. A worthy example is the 2001 U-17 FIFA World Cup. France were the defending World Cup and European champions in 2001. The road for any 17-year-old prospect to breach a squad laden with Zinedine Zidane, Thierry Henry, and Patrick Vieira amongst others was near impossible. The French conveyor belt produces talent in such volume there isn’t space—one must either be generational or wait their turn. Despite no realistic path to the French national team the 2001 U-17 squad continued their country’s international dominance and won France their first U-17 World Cup. Only six of the 18 teenagers selected played senior international football. Just one featured for the French national team. Algeria, Tunisia, Senegal, and Ivory Coast repatriated the other five in some combination.
Watching Kabar and his teammates celebrate I wondered how many would feature for the senior national team. The likelihood is most of those U-17 World Cup champions will never play for Germany, but their international careers aren’t necessarily doomed because Die Mannschaft have an abundance of options. The national team’s doors open only for a few, but were Antonio Rüdiger, Leroy Sané, Jamal Musiala, or Serge Gnabry deemed surplus for Germany they would find shelter with Sierra Leone, Senegal, Nigeria, and Ivory Coast respectively. It’s possible several of those youngsters will have international careers on the African continent.
The extractive nature of European football with relation to Africa and Africans is clear to anyone taking even a cursory glance. Those from former colonies naturally follow resources taken from their land to the metropole. This insistence on survival from a parent or grandparent creates the context for thousands of young Africans pursuing football in Europe—creating an immense pool of talent for European federations to cherry-pick and achieve whatever sporting ambitions.
With this point understood and correctly placed inside Europe’s destructive history, that book is closed and opened again when the next Olympics, Euros, or World Cup appears—but suppose the frame extended beyond Europe’s borders and sporting schedules.
Resources taken from the African continent through imperialism and colonialism do not simply alter European football. African football is influenced in equal and greater measure. The dynamic results in many African national teams being dependent on players mined from the continent but schooled in the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, France, Germany, or England, and players born in Europe who forfeit European eligibility to play for their ancestral homelands.
Superfluous in Europe, they are reintegrated to keep under-resourced and underdeveloped federations competitive on the continent (and in the Caribbean). They become as if footballing remittances.
Morocco achieved Africa’s best-ever finish at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. An investigation of their team finds most of their squad was born or developed in Europe. They represented their country and the Arab-African world, but were it not for the opulence of footballing development in Europe occurring at Africa’s expense it is hard to imagine the Atlas Lions achieving what they accomplished.
At the current African Cup of Nations, just three of Morocco’s 27-man squad are based in Africa. Four were signed by the Saudi Pro League and Qatar Stars League within the last two years; the other 20 are housed inside European leagues. Eighteen of their 27 were born outside Morocco.
Throughout Africa the pattern is similar except in certain cases. Tanzania and Mozambique represent nations who don’t export talent wholesale and whose diasporic reservoirs are comparatively shallow. Those factors result in squads heavily reliant on players born, bred, and based locally. Conversely, Egypt and South Africa produce, house, and only in special instances (e.g. Mohamed Salah) export talent to leagues around the globe. An acute analysis reveals both Egypt and South Africa have unique histories regarding European colonisation and imperialism that enhance their ability to maintain relative infrastructural integrity.
Top African national teams in almost every other example are built primarily with footballers born, developed, or employed beyond continental borders.
The state of African football should be more relevant to African people than what European football is due to its extractive behaviour. Fixing attention solely to English, French, Portuguese, or Belgian football neglects how these processes shape Nigerian, Malian, Angolan, or Congolese football and becomes a cognitive reinforcement of hierarchies placing Europe as central.
Diasporic reservoirs suggest destabilisation reaching such proportion it created thousands of migrants. Money from Western Union reaching home or a striker choosing Ghana over England highlights the level of oppression imperialist projects demand and what work remains to remove them.
Reliance on European developmental systems ultimately snookers African football. Europe has first refusal on those Africans it deems worthy and those it deems expendable. Equally relevant, the tactical ideas many African nations employ are performed in blackface—often with an accompanying European manager of questionable repute. The relationship is untenable if African nations wish to reach their full potential on the international stage.
Football is merely symptomatic. The African dependency on outside input delineates an imbalance of power. It is this power relation that must be addressed and overturned. Football pitches are not the beginning. It starts politically, then reaches sectors of society that interact with sport. Football is only—for those willing to suffer it—another prism through which such dynamics are readily observed. 🎯
Great article. As an egyptian and an avid supporter of our national team, i've only been witnessing failure after failure ever since our golden years in the late 2000s where we were able to produce a generational team in-house. Foreign managers have repeadetly failed to achieve anything with us and it feels as if we're only counting on Salah to do anything. The current state of African football needs to change and the dependancy can't go on forever...
Great article! They are also using Africa as an experimental ground for the super league - African football league.