Africa Is a Country

Africa Represent

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Africa Represent

By
Sean Jacobs

If the criteria is the number of African players each team had on the field, you need to root for Inter Milan in the 2010 UEFA Champions League Final.

Samuel Eto'o when he played for Serie A club, Inter Milan (Wiki Commons).

If the choice of which team to root for in 22 May 2010 UEFA Champions League final was based on how many African players they fielded, then apparently you should root for Inter Milan. Milan has three African players on its roster: Samuel Eto’o, Sulley Muntari and McDonald Mariga. That’s of course if Muntari and Mariga get to play.

In contrast, Bayern Munich has zero African players in its team, argues Piers Edwards in his football blog on the BBC’s site.

Didier Drogba in action for Chelsea FC vs Juventus in February 2009. Image: Crystian Cruz, via Flickr CC.

Edwards adds: “…  As excitement mounts across Africa about the looming World Cup, the European final should be the perfect curtain-raiser for the big one and affords Muntari and Mariga the chance to join the select group of Africans to have won the trophy – Bruce Grobbelaar, Abedi Pele, Rabah Madjer, Sammy Kuffuor, Kanu and Djimi Traore prominent amongst them …”

And Milan manager, Jose Mourinho, has a history of trusting African players (even if he inherited them from a previous manager) in key positions–think Benni McCartyhy at Porto or Didier Drogba, Michael Essien and John Mikel Obi at Chelsea.

Further Reading

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.

Whose game is remembered?

The Women’s Africa Cup of Nations opens in Morocco amid growing calls to preserve the stories, players, and legacy of the women who built the game—before they’re lost to erasure and algorithm alike.