Something in the water

Africa's best football players come from West Africa. That's just facts.

Kehinde Wiley's painting of John Mensah, Samuel Eto'o and Emmanuel Eboue.

Right after New Year’s, on January 10 to be exact, FIFA will announce its World XI 2011. The result, they remind us, will be based on voting by over 50,000 professional soccer players from around the world. “Every voting player selects one goalkeeper, four defenders, three midfielders and three strikers.”  True, the 3-year-old award feels like another one of those endless FIFA awards created to showcase sponsors’ products. But I’ll take it. Now comes the news that FIFA just announced a shortlist of 55 players from which the final 11 players for the World XI 2011 will come from.

A quick “analysis” suggests no surprises:

The bulk of those shortlisted play for European clubs in three countries: Spain (18 players), England (17) and Italy (15).

The rest on the shortlist play either for German clubs (4) or in the French first division (1).

Real Madrid, Barcelona, Manchester United and Chelsea dominate the list with the most players.

Finally, Spain has 10 players on the shortlist, with the second largest national representation coming from the largest African country in South America, Brazil–with 9 players.

As for African countries on the continent: only four players made the shortlist:

Yaya Touré (Cote d’Ivoire and Manchester City);

Samuel Eto’o (Cameroon and Anzhi);

Didier Drogba (Cote d’Ivoire and Chelsea); and

Michael Essien (Ghana and Chelsea).

Of the four, only Touré, Drogba and Eto’o still regularly turn out for their respective national teams.  And Touré and Drogba will be in action at next year’s African Nations Cup (ANC) in Equatorial Guinea and Gabon. Cameroon has not qualified for the ANC and Eto’o is the subject of a disciplinary procedure for leading a recent player revolt in the national team and is playing–and cashing a huge paycheck–in Russia’s top league. Essien, who has been injured, hasn’t played for Ghana in a while–he did not make the 2010 World Cup squad–though he recently expressed an interest in playing again for his country.

I was surprised at the omission of Kevin Prince Boateng, (Ghana and AC Milan) from the list. He is arguably the most exciting player of this generation of African players. (Boateng recently announced his retirement from international football.)

I am not sure if this poor showing is another sign of the poor health of continental African football. In fact, all four players left their homes early and are really products of European, mostly French, youth club systems.

But perhaps, we can agree on one thing with the world’s professional players: the best African players come from West Africa.

Here’s the full list.

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.