Africa shows its best side at the tournament in Côte d’Ivoire. Sometimes also from his cliche. A visit to the stadium.
Nigerian fans cheer on their team at the Africa Cup. The country will play Angola in the quarterfinals on Friday.
Sunday Alamba / AP
Down on the pitch, one of the most expensive footballers in the world is running his heart out. Up in the stands, sector B12, the Nigeria fan block is shouting loudly. Below: Victor Osimhen, Napoli striker, Nigeria star, transfer value over 100 million euros. Above: Nigeria’s fans, dressed in green and white, with trumpets and drums that only fall silent during halftime. It’s hot, but many people in the fan block still dance for ninety minutes and share the water.
It’s Africa Cup, Africa’s continental championship. Africa’s national teams will compete in Côte d’Ivoire until February 11th to choose the best among them. The quarterfinals begin on Friday. Most of the favorites are eliminated, Nigeria is still there. Thanks to this win against Cameroon in the round of 16. Nigeria – Cameroon is a classic of African football, “super eagles” against “indomitable lions”, this evening: 2-0. Also thanks to Victor Osimhen, who doesn’t score a goal, but runs and dribbles, is repeatedly brought down and causes constant unrest in Cameroon’s defense.
Victor Osimhen is the undisputed star of Nigeria’s national team.
Ulrik Pedersen/Getty
At the end of the game, Osimhen dances in front of the curve, who chants his name for minutes, as she did during the game. The striker, recently voted Africa’s Footballer of the Year, is a man on a mission, writes a journalist on the news service X. It reads: Africa champion.
The South African is a hit with the Nigerians
The Africa Cup is special. It’s not just about sport. The tournament brings together a continent fragmented into more than fifty countries, many of which have little in common. But every two years, in townships in South Africa, in high-priced bars in Nairobi and in front of food stalls in Abidjan, crowds of people glue themselves to screens and cheer and suffer with their own national team – or with that of another country.
You can see it in the stands at Nigeria – Cameroon. 22,000 spectators came to the Félix Houphouët Boigny Stadium, named after a president who stayed in office too long like many African presidents. In the Nigeria block, a fan who had a suit made from the South African flag swayed along among the green and white-clad trumpeters. A few meters away sits a young woman wearing a Côte d’Ivoire jersey with a small Nigerian flag in her hair. Some of the fans who are shouting Osimhen’s name the loudest have tied on the Ivorian flag.
The Félix Houphouët Boigny Stadium in the city of Abidjan is one of the venues for the African Cup of Nations.
Luc Gnago / Reuters
The top scorer from the Spanish third division
The African Cup is also special because stars like Victor Osimhen compete against nobody. And the nobodies often outdo the stars. The current top scorer, for example, is called Emilio Nsue, he is 34, plays in the third highest Spanish league and in the African Cup for Equatorial Guinea. Nsue (market value three zeros less than Osimhen) has scored five goals, four more than Osimhen.
The tournament is also full of crazy surprises and twists. Heavyweights such as Ghana, Algeria and Tunisia were eliminated in the group games. In the round of 16, the tournament favorites Senegal, Egypt and Morocco – which was the first African team to qualify for the semi-finals at the last World Cup in Qatar – were hit.
Equatorial Guinea’s Emilio Nsue (right, here against Guinea’s Amadou Diawara) is currently the tournament’s top scorer.
Luc Gnago / Reuters
Instead, supposed dwarfs grew beyond themselves: Above all, Cape Verde, a small island state off the West African coast. They won their group comfortably and eliminated Mauritania, another surprise team, in the round of 16. In the quarter-finals they will face the anything but invincible South Africa.
Before the start of the tournament, experts were concerned that the increase from 16 to 24 teams could harm the quality of the sport. Nobody talks about it anymore. Instead, many talk about the best African Cup of all time.
The crazy story of the host country
One of the craziest stories to date is written by the host country. Côte d’Ivoire was virtually eliminated after their 4-0 disgrace against Equatorial Guinea. She did this in front of the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister. They had brought with them the American Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was visiting. That added to the shame.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken watches the game between Equatorial Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire together with the Prime Minister of Côte d’Ivoire, Robert Beugre Mambé, and Patrice Motsepe, President of the CAF.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / Reuters
The mood in the following days was strange in Abidjan, the Ivorian coastal metropolis and one of the most modern cities on the continent. Abidjan had dressed up for the games. The city was decorated in orange, the star striker Sébastien Haller laughed from all the posters, but no one else laughed when the conversation turned to the national team. Taxi drivers and bar patrons whispered conspiracy theories; The national football association is to blame, as is politics, which ensured that not the best players were called up, but those who were politically acceptable. Newspapers formulated slogans for perseverance: “After the pain – why we have to keep believing.”
And then actually the resurrection. Thanks to Morocco’s win against Zambia, Côte d’Ivoire was suddenly one of the best third-place teams in the group and was therefore still in the round of 16. In Abidjan, fireworks boomed in the night sky, fans ran through the streets with national flags and celebrated in front of the hotel of their national players, who had done nothing except suffer in front of the television like the rest of the nation. Even at dawn, the muezzin’s calls to prayer were drowned out by the noise of vuvuzela-blaring fans.
Morocco’s Michael Amir Junior Richardson (top) and Zambia’s Changa Miguel Chaiwa in an aerial duel during the group stage.
Ulrik Pedersen/Getty
A few days later the next delirium occurred. In the penalty shootout, Côte d’Ivoire knocked out the favorites and defending champions Senegal, who had played the best football of all teams up to that point. Notably, Côte d’Ivoire won without a coach, as the previous one had been fired after the 0-4 disgrace. The team is now led by one of the assistants who could make himself immortal. On Saturday we play in the quarterfinals against Mali.
New stadiums, roads, bridges and tunnels
The Africa Cup is often Africa at its best, sometimes at its cliched. During the group games, a bus transporting journalists had an accident. Several of them had to go to the hospital injured. A few days later, one of them said in a hotel bar that several Ivoirian ministers had shown up at the hospital. Apparently they were at least as concerned about the image of the host country as they were about the health of the journalists who had an accident. A minister gave an injured colleague an envelope and asked him to report cautiously. In it: 100,000 CFA francs, the equivalent of 140 francs.
The government’s concern is understandable; it has put a lot on the line for the African Cup. It has had new stadiums, roads, bridges and tunnels built for over a billion francs. The goal: to present Côte d’Ivoire to the continent and the world as a model African country. When a test match in the new national stadium had to be canceled a few months before the start of the tournament because the pitch flooded, it cost the sports minister his job.
In the Treichville district of Abidjan, the streets are decorated with the flags of the participating nations.
Siphiwe Sibeko / Reuters
That’s why the government has little use for foreign journalists who write negative things and a national team that fails. One can assume that the president and ministers cheered as loudly as the fans in the streets after the unexpected qualification for the round of 16.
The coach from the colonial power is gone
The African Cup cannot be separated from politics in any other way. In Cameroon, Anglophone separatists have declared football fans enemies of their fight for independence. They stole televisions and radios and kidnapped and killed several fans. In Côte d’Ivoire, the sacked national coach was a Frenchman; After his dismissal, some said: “It couldn’t go well with someone from the former colonial power. It’s high time we freed ourselves from him.” In the quarterfinals, Côte d’Ivoire will face Mali, a neighboring country ruled by coup plotters who have just announced their withdrawal from the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), breaking with the Ivorian government.
The Africa Cup is also geopolitics. American Secretary of State Blinken’s match visit took place in a stadium that was built with Chinese money – like many stadiums on the continent. Blinken’s diplomatic trip was also about making up ground that the USA lost in Africa to China, Russia and other powers. Blinken spoke in Côte d’Ivoire about football and about Islamist terrorism that is spreading in the region.
At the round of 16 between Nigeria and Cameroon, Cameroonian fans dance and make music.
Luc Gnago / Reuters
So there is a lot at stake in this Africa Cup. But this hasn’t dampened the mood since the hosts’ miraculous resurrection. After the round of 16 between Nigeria and Cameroon, fans refused to leave the stadium half an hour after the end of the game. Some film themselves with their cell phones, others, with their bodies painted, shout Victor Osimhen’s name into the microphones of amateur reporters streaming on YouTube.
A little later, a fan in a Nigeria jersey and cap sinks onto the asphalt in front of the stadium and cheers his heart out: “Deux-zéro, deux-zéro,” he shouts. Why he does it in French, a language that hardly anyone in English-speaking Nigeria speaks, is unclear. But it doesn’t matter in the Africa Cup, a crazy tournament that brings together a fragmented continent.