I have spent this week reflecting on African football.
Qualifiers for the next Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) have begun, the identity of the reigning champions still awaits a ruling from the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and Nigeria begins its campaign without a federation board, after its president and executive committee resigned in August—a rare case of Nigerian football administrators paying a price for failure, though, as I will argue, not quite the accountability it first appears.
None of it can be separated from the politics and money that will shape next year’s FIFA presidential election.
Weeks after the 2026 World Cup in North America, FIFA unveiled a plan to sell a stake in the tournament’s commercial rights to private investors.
The proposal would have seen a new entity, FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), take over FIFA’s broadcast, sponsorship, ticketing, and licensing operations.
FIFA would keep control and sell minority stakes to outside investors, raising up to $4.2 billion against a $20 billion valuation.
The lead investor was reportedly Thrive, a firm founded by Joshua Kushner, whose brother Jared is US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law.
To win the member associations’ approval, FIFA promised to raise each one’s development allocation for 2027–2030 from about $8 million to $20 million, with an optional further $20 million paid up front.
But the backlash, largely led by UEFA, the European confederation, was swift and relentless. Within days, FIFA president Gianni Infantino withdrew the plan and has spent the weeks since trying to salvage his presidency and avert a challenge that previously seemed impossible.
During this period, Africa’s confederation stood firmly with Infantino. Several federation presidents backed him publicly, and Samuel Eto’o, the Camerounian legend who now runs his country’s federation, went further, arguing that the plan could have done a great deal for smaller federations.
FIFA’s crisis meeting was held in Rabat rather than Zurich, and the executive committee of the Confederation of African Football (CAF) later met there and unanimously reaffirmed its support for him.
Much of the commentary has cast this as a deferential, even subservient, relationship, with Africa as a continent unable to stand up for “true footballing values” once money is on the table.
But Africa’s relationship with FIFA did not begin in deference. UEFA may have threatened a boycott this summer, but in 1966 it was African federations, led by Ghana’s Ohene Djan and Ethiopia’s Yidnekatchew Tessema, that boycotted World Cup qualifying ahead of England ’66 because they had been made to share a single qualifying place with Asia and Oceania, while Europe had 10 of the 16 spots.
The boycott worked: Since the next tournament, in 1970, Africa has had at least one guaranteed place. In 1974, the same bloc helped the Brazilian João Havelange defeat Stanley Rous for the FIFA presidency.
Rous had spent years trying to keep apartheid South Africa, already shut out by CAF, inside world football.
However, Havelange’s victory set the terms of the bargain that has governed FIFA-Africa relations since. He campaigned on the promise of expanded tournaments and development for the Global South.
He delivered them, but he also brought a culture of patronage that defined his 25 years in power. Sepp Blatter, his long-serving general secretary, inherited the same structure when he succeeded him in 1998, and used it to peel away African federations even though CAF officially backed UEFA’s Lennart Johansson.
In 2002, when CAF’s own president, Issa Hayatou, contested the presidency, he was beaten heavily, deserted by members who preferred the patron they had to the African they might have had.
Under Infantino, FIFA has become even more involved in Africa’s management. In 2017, Madagascar’s Ahmad Ahmad unseated Hayatou as CAF president, a result Infantino reportedly supported, and in 2018 Ahmad declared Africa’s support for Infantino’s re-election a year early.
In 2021, Infantino cast a long shadow as rivals stood aside and endorsed Patrice Motsepe, the South African mining billionaire, as new CAF president, after FIFA had sent its own secretary-general, Fatma Samoura, to run CAF’s affairs for six months in 2019, and after Ahmad was banned by FIFA’s ethics committee.
Motsepe’s tenure has recorded successes, but critics still cast him as Infantino’s puppet in Cairo.
The politics of football on the continent have changed too. Back then, many political leaders saw football as yet another theater of development and anti-imperialist engagement.
Now the game has been ceded to career football politicians, who have mostly traded votes for development money and loyalty. \
That may sound like an indictment, but the trade is also pragmatic: African federations need FIFA’s money more than most, and a grant that more than doubles is a powerful inducement.
Spread across the continent, that money can also reorder established hierarchies and make African football more competitive, which is the strongest case for the bargain. The deeper issue is what the game’s surplus is made of.
Africa develops talent and exports it, with the value mostly realised in Europe by the clubs that buy and sell it, and the leagues that broadcast it around the world.
The 2026 World Cup puts that case to the test. Nigeria and Cameroun, with eight AFCON titles between them, failed to qualify.
This followed repeated challenges within Nigeria’s football management, including three coaches in a single qualifying campaign, several disputes over unpaid wages and bonuses, and a security agency investigation into how a ₦17 billion government fund meant to settle them was spent.
That investigation is also why the board’s resignation is not quite the accountability it looks like. Ibrahim Gusau and his colleagues stepped down after weeks of reports that they were being pressured to go, and the National Sports Commission promptly suspended the election to replace them.
FIFA treats government interference in federations as grounds for suspension, leaving Nigerian fans caught between administrators no one can remove and a state that removes them through pressure.
Eto’o, Cameroon’s federation president, has fought openly with the sports ministry, including over who should coach the national team.
Their size, pedigree, and economic weight ought to make them less dependent on FIFA’s money than most, which makes their loyalty harder, not easier, to explain.
Compare them with Comoros, a two-time AFCON qualifier, and Cape Verde, whose debut World Cup run to the round of 32, unbeaten in a group with Spain and Uruguay, won over neutrals everywhere.
The president of the Comoros federation has told reporters that his federation has struggled to make ends meet, while FIFA’s own announcement of the plan held up Cape Verde as an example of how a decade of Forward funding enabled the debutants to qualify for the tournament.
Infantino’s strongest ally remains Morocco, whose federation president, Fouzi Lekjaa, was one of the first to pledge his support. Rabat will host the next FIFA presidential election, and Morocco has lobbied hard to stage the final of the 2030 World Cup, which it cohosts with Spain and Portugal.
Morocco has gone from missing four straight World Cups to reaching a semifinal in 2022 and a quarterfinal this year.
It is also, for now, Africa’s champion, though not because of anything that happened on the pitch. Senegal won the Cup of Nations final in Rabat in January, but CAF’s appeal board later ruled that Senegal had forfeited the match because its players left the field in protest at a late penalty, and recorded a 3–0 win for Morocco.
Senegal’s appeal goes before the Court of Arbitration for Sport on October 8, and this contested status does not help change the impression that FIFA’s most important African ally holds the continental title by an off-pitch decision.
These examples seem to make a neat case for either prudent FIFA-backed spending, like Cape Verde’s, or prudent football management, like Morocco’s. But the binary does not hold.
Cape Verde may owe some of its success to FIFA funding, which supported pitch infrastructure and coach-training courses, but it also owes much to its strategy of building a national team from its diaspora in Portugal and the Netherlands.
Morocco’s state-of-the-art Mohammed VI Football Complex, along with its recruitment from the diaspora, has also enabled it to field competitive teams across genders and age groups, culminating in last year’s men’s U-20 World Cup title. Neither project was authored by FIFA, and FIFA cannot take credit for either.
What African football actually shows is that competence and patronage are not opposites. They can work together. Morocco’s long-term planning has bought it leverage, and this summer it spent that leverage on loyalty.
Nigeria and Cameroon, their administrations in disarray, needed the grant too badly to spend their votes on anything else. The strong and the struggling ended up in the same place, and none of them used their position to ask FIFA for anything. Cape Verde and other emerging football nations face a different test: whether they can turn a diaspora-built national team into lasting domestic pipelines.
This complicates any simple reading of the $20 million grant as a bribe, and shows how one continent’s support can conceal very different interests and motivations.
None of this makes UEFA football’s moral arbiter. It saw off the Super League in 2021, then catered to the whims of its super clubs by expanding the Champions League to 36 teams. Europe’s biggest clubs, meanwhile, are represented by a body led by Nasser Al-Khelaifi of Paris Saint-Germain and Qatar Sports Investments. Gulf money sat on both sides of this fight.
Africa has no more reason to trust European piety than FIFA’s generosity.
The FFE plan was, in effect, a scheme to sell the rights to that flow of value. African federations were right to take its money seriously, and they do not deserve to be tarred as sellouts for doing so. They went wrong by handing over their votes without asking for anything in return.
An Infantino re-election would cement a FIFA politics built on courting Africa’s substantial 54 votes. Leverage of this kind is not a problem in itself: UEFA leverages its markets, Asia leverages its growing investment and viewers, and South America has long utilized its marketable stars.
The question is whether Africa uses its own leverage for anything that lasts. Infantino has proposed an independent review of FIFA’s governance, to go before the FIFA Council on October 15, and has assured every association that its treatment will not depend on its position on any proposal. The fact that he felt the need to say so is telling.
Africa’s football leaders could spend this leverage on loyalty or, as they did in 1966, to build something more structural. They could press for more independently audited development funding that avoids pitches built as political enterprises, seek larger shares of transfer fees for academies that produce players, and assert a real voice over a calendar that caters to Europe and is not truly global.
None of these would come as a gift from a patron; they would have to be demanded.
Football’s capacity to do good in harsh economic conditions is undeniable. But there is a difference between development that is authored and owned on the continent and development handed down as patronage.
The question African fans and the administrators who answer to them should be asking is how to make those administrators start asking for something in return that no one in Zurich can simply give as a gift.
