By Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (May 25^th 2026)

The Centenary and its Legacy

African football has yet to achieve the potential that Brasilian great Pelé saw for it. The 23^rd FIFA World Cup is looming large – it will have the largest representation of world football ever (48 teams), ten of which will be African. One of Africa’s top teams – Nigeria, which achieved the highest ever FIFA ranking in the 1990s will be absent.

Sadly, Nigeria was robbed of its opportunity when the politics of a butcher intervened. Its late dictator, the vicious General Sani Abacha, prevented the defending Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) champions from defending their title in the finally Apartheid-free South Africa – South Africa won their first and only AFCON title to date. Meanwhile, Nigeria was banned from the 1998 AFCON in Mali.

Qualifiers

Meanwhile, former AFCON champions Egypt, Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Algeria, Tunisia, South Africa and la Côte d’Ivoire qualified for the World Cup along with recent AFCON finalists, Morocco and Sénégal, both of whom are former AFCON champions[1]. The only African qualifier never to have won an AFCON title or even reached the final is (the) Cape Verde (Islands).

To date the best performance by African nations in the FIFA World Cup is Morocco’s fourth place finish in 2022. The next best is Cameroun in 1990, Sénégal in 2002 and Ghana in 2010, all of whom reached the quarter-finals.

However, almost a century ago – 98 years to be precise – another country announced the arrival of African football, or rather, it should have done. At the turn of the last century FIFA was established and it organised the football tournaments at the Olympic Games from 1908 until it made the decision to split in 1929 by organising its own tournament, the FIFA World Cup.

The Unofficial World Championship

That meant that Amsterdam’s Olympic Games of 1928 was the last time that the football tournament at the Olympic Games was the last time that it represented an unofficial world championship. Egypt was the only African country to play in the Olympic Games Football tournaments and in Amsterdam in 1928 they became the first African country to reach the semi-finals of the tournament.

It took 94 years for any African nation to match that achievement. And Egypt bizarrely missed the first FIFA World Cup, allegedly literally missing the boat to a tournament where they surely stood a good chance of doing even better than in 1928 as Europe’s top nations including Italy chose not to go to Uruguay for the first FIFA World Cup.

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[1] The recent AFCON final was won on the pitch controversially by Sénégal, but contested by Morocco. The ultimate winners will be decided by the Court of Arbitration for Sport CAS (CAS).