• Alex Hochuli

As club football becomes increasingly placeless and commercialized, international football begins to feel strangely real again.

• Maher Mezahi

In Algeria, football stadiums have long been sites of protest, expression, and resistance. As public space shrinks and surveillance rises, their political future hangs in the balance.

• Duncan Nortier

Bafana Bafana’s World Cup exploits has South Africans chanting “No DNA, just RSA!” But against a rising tide of xenophobia, what South Africa are we actually rooting for?

• Fiifi Anaman

In 1957, three months after Ghanaian independence, the world’s most celebrated footballer came to Accra to teach. What Stanley Matthews left behind changed Ghanaian football forever.

• Aomar Boum
• Brahim El Guabli

When Ayyoub Bouaddi chose Morocco over France, he wasn’t just making a football decision, he was enacting a theory of citizenship that has been in the making since 1880.

• Nyasha Karimakwenda

Despite renewed efforts to criminalize and erase queerness, LGBTQ Africans continue to challenge the myth that their lives and identities are somehow un-African.

• Bonginkosi Ndadane

Some African football fans have been hate-watching Bafana Bafana at the World Cup because of South Africa’s anti-migrant politics. The team’s apolitical stance has left them without a defense.

• Lester Kiewit

Abdullah Ibrahim was difficult, suspicious, and brilliant. And beneath all of it, he was searching for home.

• Karim Zidan

The UFC White House event looked like the final triumph of the UFC-Trump alliance. But it was actually something more consequential: the first act in a darker chapter of American politics.

• Mattie C. Webb

The Cape Town Marathon has become Africa’s first World Marathon Major. But can a city that sees itself as an exception to the continent be its marathon capital?

• Faisal Ali

The World Cup was meant to be the culmination of Omar Artan’s remarkable rise. His exclusion from it revealed something equally striking: the magnitude of the admiration he had earned at home and globally.

• Alasdair Howorth

Cabo Verde’s national team is at the World Cup for the first time in their history. To understand why they might surprise everyone, you need to understand morabeza.

• Dawson McCall

The refusal of the US government to admit Somali referee Omar Artan is a reminder that the United States has a long history of using sports as a tool of exclusion, especially when it comes to African and African-descended athletes.

• Momar Dieng

Between the visa bond, the digital surveillance requirements, and the 74 percent rejection rate, the Trump administration has made it nearly impossible for Senegalese fans and journalists to attend the World Cup.

• Maher Mezahi

Against a tournament shadowed by visa refusals and bureaucratic hostility, the unexpected love affair between the Algerian national team and the city of Lawrence, Kansas, is a welcome reminder of what the World Cup is actually supposed to be about. 

• Alex Čizmić

Bosnia’s World Cup squad is built on the descendants of war and displacement, players raised across Europe and North America who are finding their way back through football.

• Buster Kirchner

Why are the religious practices of African footballers treated as strange when athletes around the world turn to faith and superstition to navigate the game’s uncertainty?

• Lee Nxumalo

For decades, Bafana Bafana embodied the disappointments of the democratic era. As the team recovers, South Africans are once again projecting their political aspirations and fears onto the national side.

• Maher Mezahi

The exclusion of Somali referee Omar Artan hardens the contradiction at the heart of the 2026 World Cup: a global tournament increasingly shaped by the politics of exclusion.

• Boima Tucker

The World Cup was born from imperial rivalry and nationalist aspiration. Almost a century later, it still oscillates between mass hope and elite spectacle.