Why Africa hasn't won the FIFA World Cup

4. POOR DOMESTIC SOCCER OUTPUT/EXPOSURE

African countries are not doing enough to ensure quality output of local players and particularly managers from their domestic soccer leagues. The typical African side today at a world cup tournament hardly has up to 5 players (if any at all) playing in that country’s domestic league. Of the 5 African qualifiers for the 2018 World Cup, only 2 have 4 players or more playing in their domestic league. None have up to 10! In contrast, all of the last 3 world cup winners have been made up of mostly their domestic league players. Even the South Americans, who tend to migrate more because soccer in Europe is more lucrative, have produced their most recent world cup winning squads mostly from players in the Argentine and Brazilian leagues respectively.

It may be a truth that many African countries cannot possibly produce domestic players of the same quality as Germany, Spain and Italy. However, what must be recognized is that if Africa’s home based players know that playing good football for a top domestic side gives them a good chance of making it into their country’s team to the world cup, many of these players would be willing to take the risk of delaying their sojourn abroad until after they have achieved enough with their domestic club/clubs to earn a national team shirt rather than either going to play second or third tier roles in foreign clubs or going to second tier soccer leagues with only money as the motivation.

The previously highlighted problem of age fraud may partly be because many of Africa's home based players feel they can only gain recognition at home by playing in age grade teams.

Rather than have a very few home based players battling to make in into their national team (world cup inclusive) squads, African teams should have a quota of not more than 11 foreign based players in every world cup squad. Rather than using so many home based players in world cup qualifiers only to replace almost all of them with second rate foreign based professionals in a world cup bound squad, the foreign based pros should know they are competing against themselves for a limited number of slots in the world cup bound team.

The current African Nations Championship which features only domestic league players in Africa should gain more importance in the African game!

At the 1982 World Cup, Africa only lost one match out of 6. The 2 teams that represented the continent at that tournament (Raber Madjer’s Algeria and Roger Milla’s Cameroon) are still legendary till today. It is noteworthy that both teams were made up largely of domestic talent! Raber Madjer, George Weah and Finidi George seem to be great evidence that a player who has proven himself as a senior level talent in Africa has a brighter future in Europe than when that is not the case.

At the managerial level, it is quite an intriguing statistic that no country has ever won the world cup with a foreign manager! While this does not suggest that foreign managers cannot possibly bring about world cup success (Greece won the 2016 Euro Tournament with one), it shows that the ultimate level for every aspiring world cup winning nation is the ability to raise world class managers at home!

AHLY-ZAMALEK. Two top African and Egyptian clubs do battle.