The AFCON's reckoning

Why are the scales of power in African football tipping

At the opening ceremony of the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations, CAF president Dr Patrice Motsepe boldly claimed that this would be greatest Africa Cup of Nations of all time.

I don’t think he had an inkling of what would come in the next three weeks.

This tournament has had everything. Brilliant football, excellent crowds driven by the cosmopolitan make up of Côte d'Ivoire, but what has made this tournament truly special is the constant upsets.

Teboho Mokoena’s exceptional free kick didn’t just end Morocco’s hopes of claiming a first AFCON title in almost fifty years, but also officially broke the natural order.

Of the top five ranked African nations coming into the tournament five have been knocked out. Of the eight teams that qualified for the 2021 AFCON quarter finals precisely zero made it to the same stage in Côte d'Ivoire, something that is unprecedented not only in Africa but at major international football tournaments across the world.

AFCON 2023 is officially bonkers.

Incompetency finally being punished

The AFCON has always been held up as the great equaliser. Doesn’t matter how good your team is, the AFCON will find a way to break them down and expose any weaknesses.

While this is glib and often times laced with healthy amounts of racism, there are elements of truth to it. There are more variables to overcome at the AFCON than perhaps any other tournament.

When planning for this competition, coaches and players don’t simply have to think about tactics. Will they have somewhere safe and comfortable to sleep? Will the pitches hold up to play? Will the federation president force me to play a player that they like? Will I have to deal with a sports minister who wants to come and give the half time team talk?

Roberto ‘Pico’ Lopes told this very parish that the key to Cape Verde’s success at this tournament is the chef they brought with them. In Tubarões Azuis’ loss against Senegal, Lopes and other teammates were suffering from severe food poisoning.

But at this tournament at least some of those variables have been eliminated. The pitches have generally been excellent. Teams are staying in 5-star hotels with good training facilities.

As the external variables are limited, the importance of competency has never been higher and so those federations, coaches or players that are not up to scratch are being found out.

Ghana have been a mess for years thanks to mismanagement. There is no clear plan from the federation, they have gone through four coaches in a little over two years and despite spending well over $8 million on their pre-tournament preparation the best they could do was plan a trip to South Africa that was cancelled and eventually prepare for the tournament at home in sub-par facilities in Kumasi.

Cameroon have a plan, well they have Senegal’s plan. Since he took over as federation president, Samuel Eto’o has been trying to replicate what Senegal did by installing a respected former player, bring in a young and hungry squad and build towards a long-term project.

But Rigobert Song is clearly not at the same standard as Cisse as a coach and as manager. And despite Eto’o’s brilliant playing career, he has struggled to make the move into administration, regularly interfering with player selection and even joining the players in the dressing room to either celebrate with them or lambast them.

While they are generally a better fun federation, like Cameroon, Egypt allowed for their AFCON campaign to be completely side-tracked by a super star. Mo Salah’s injury saga derailed the Pharaoh’s campaign as the soap opera of will-he-wont-he play or go back to Liverpool made the team look comical.

The chaotic nature of the AFCON would previously mask a lot of the deficiencies of teams so that astonishing individual performances from coaches or players could lead to success despite problems behind the scenes. No more.

Rising middle class

If the top tier of footballing nations are struggling to come to grips with the modern African footballing landscape, Africa’s middle class certainly isn’t.

While Nigeria and Ghana still don’t have any proper training facilities, Mauritania and Mali have built technical centres and new stadiums.

 Nations like Cape Verde and Equatorial Guinea have been able to look past the messy politics of footballing stars at home to build coherent teams of relatively unknown players from their diasporas.

But perhaps more important than anything else is the improving standard of coaching on the continent. Previously, if an African nation wanted a top coach they would have to pay top dollar for a European to come and take charge or be lucky enough to be a nation with enough football heritage to have a pool of national coaches at a high standard.

But with the globalisation of the sport, more and more nations have local coaches that have been able to travel, study the game and train as top coaches in Europe or elsewhere before bringing their newfound knowledge home.

Collin Benjamin, the architect of the greatest achievement in the history of Namibian football when they beat Tunisia in the group stage, was the first Namibian to play in the UEFA Champions League during the decade he spent with Hamburg. He then stayed in Germany and became the first Namibian to acquire a UEFA A coaching license.

Juan Micha Obiang similarly is the first Equatorial-Guinean to get his coaching badges. He went on to coach at various levels of football for the national team from the U17s to the women’s side before taking the men’s senior side and leading them to back-to-back knock out finishes at the AFCON and inflicted the greatest AFCON humiliation in history when his side beat hosts Côte d'Ivoire 4-0 earlier in the tournament.

The proliferation of former players who are becoming top managers affects not only those local coaches but the foreign coaches as well. Previously the standard of European coaches on offer for the middle class of African nations who could not pay top-dollar was variable to say the least.

But at this tournament, the calibre of European coaches has not only improved, but their commitment to the nations they coach has had to improve.

Sébastien Desabre’s success as DR Congo’s boss is underlined by the fact he moved to Kinshasa rather than staying in France. Pedro Gonçalves has been in Angola for nearly a decade where he has worked his way up from club football to youth coaching before being given the reigns of the Palancas Negras.

What this increased standard of coaching has left us with is smaller teams that have identities which bigger teams still held back by external factors have been unable to create.

Ten years ago Cape Verde beating Ghana would have been unimaginable, today it isn’t a surprise that they comprehensibly outplayed the Black Stars.

The AFCON will always have mystical elements to it and that’s why we love it. There is a genuine sense that there is more at play than can be quantified, but to simply put what has happened at this tournament down to “AFCON doing AFCON things” would be lazy stereotyping and doing the people who have put the work into transforming this landscape a huge disservice.

This tournament is less a series of unforeseeable shocks but rather a reckoning that has been a long time coming.