CAF needs a new direction
The FIFA World Cup finished a couple of weeks ago, and now we assess how African teams have done and why they will never win the biggest trophy in world football. Geopolitics prevents African teams from winning this prestigious trophy.
The relationship between CAF and FIFA fragments the possibility of an African country winning the World Cup. CAF has not had a good relationship with FIFA, stemming from disagreements between the two organisations, particularly over the scheduling of the AFCON every four years rather than two.
Despite the broken relationship between the two parties, Africa remains riddled with corruption and poverty, which affects the development of grassroots football on the continent.
In other continents, there are established organisations such as the EU that support the foundation of grassroots football through the European Sports Model, which governs open competitions and promotes financial solidarity but also supports elements of grassroots.
Africa lacks this, as the national government focuses on the extraction of natural resources rather than creating a footballing nation that brings sport tourism wealth to respective nations.
Africa has a lot of talent that will not be seen or played for a team because the grassroots in Africa don’t exist. African countries focus on players playing abroad rather than their homegrown talents.
CAF lacks the backbone to withstand other organisations, and it has not shown a willingness to make the game in Africa more exciting to generate talent that can compete with its American and European counterparts.
Although there were a lot of teams that qualified for this World Cup and Cape Verde showed glimpses of hope for an African nation to do well in the World Cup, it is still not enough to show they can compete with the likes of Spain and Argentina.
In this lifetime, no African team is ready to compete with the rest of the world. One thing is that no African team is even in the top eight in the FIFA rankings; maybe they need to be in the top ten of the rankings before they consider or contemplate winning the World Cup.
African countries need to do a lot of work with the national footballing pyramid before they can compete with the top nations globally.
