AfricaIs aCountry

The Beautiful Game

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

The Beautiful Game

By
Sean Jacobs

Correction: You don’t have to be a football fanatic, be a supporter of the English Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur or–for some of this blog’s readers–care whether the club has African players on its books–they have*–but you will enjoy this piece of animation of English player Gareth Bale’s goals earlier in the club’s Champions League campaign against Inter Milan, the defending champions. Tottenham are through to the quarterfinals after beating another Italian club AC Milan this week.

The animation is by Richard Swarbrick.

* Tottenham has the African players Steven Pienaar, Sebastian Bassong and Benoit Assou-Ekotto under contract.

Further Reading

Empire’s middlemen

From Portuguese Goa to colonial Kampala, Mahmood Mamdani’s latest book shows how India became an instrument of empire, and a scapegoat in its aftermath.

À qui s’adresse la CAN ?

Entre le coût du transport aérien, les régimes de visas, la culture télévisuelle et l’exclusion de classe, le problème de l’affluence à la CAN est structurel — et non le signe d’un manque de passion des supporters.

Lions in the rain

The 2025 AFCON final between Senegal and Morocco was a dramatic spectacle that tested the limits of the match and the crowd, until a defining moment held everything together.