Alex song. Image via Arta Solar 7. Every year, around this point in the football calendar is when I like to take a lay of the land across African men’s domestic football league tables and map out which clubs are positioned to compete in next year’s CAF Champions League and Confederations Cup. This annual exercise tends to follow familiar patterns as elite clubs continue their domination of domestic championships. However, this year feels different. In Egypt, Zamalek is in prime position to shatter the Ahly-Pyramids duopoly that has defined the last decade of Egyptian football. Morocco’s Botola Pro is witnessing an unlikely insurgency, with Maghreb Fez and AS FAR muscling ahead of perennial heavyweights Wydad and Raja Casablanca. Tunisia and South Africa are telling similar stories. Club Africain and Orlando Pirates currently lead their respective divisions, with the reigning champions, Esperance and Mamelodi Sundowns—who have collectively claimed 14 of the last 16 domestic titles between them—breathing down their necks. However, nothing across the continent caught my attention quite like what is happening in Djibouti. In the most recent league rankings published by the Djiboutian Football Federation, Arta Solar 7 are currently fighting relegation, sitting at 8th place out of 10 clubs. Considering they made global headlines a few years ago after signing Cameroonian midfielder Alex Song, I was expecting Arta Solar 7 to be contending for the championship. The club was acquired in 2018 by Tommy Tayoro, the Ivorian son-in-law of 78 year-old President Ismail Omar Guelleh (who just won a sixth presidential term this past April with 98% of the vote). Once embedded within the presidential orbit, Tayoro started a solar energy company called Solar 7 and a private aviation venture, Ivory Jet Services. It was through Solar 7 that he assumed ownership of Arta, a modest Djiboutian club that was about to become briefly, bizarrely famous. Tayoro made his first splash signing in November 2020 when Song touched down in Djibouti. A motorcade of black SUVs and luxury sedans met him on the tarmac. Schoolchildren lined the roads presumably plucked from classrooms to applaud for the cameras. In a press room packed at capacity, Song declared, “I remember when I was younger and the Cameroonian national team would pass by in a team bus and I’d run after it. Now I see the same kids running after me, and I think—this was me just a little while ago. This is what I wanted to bring to Djibouti.” What wasn’t communicated at that press conference was the salary that Song reportedly signed for, an amount that conservative estimates put at $14,000 per month. Such a signing is put into relief by the fact that—according to the World Bank—more than half of Djiboutians make less than $5 USD per day. As Christopher Dilo, a French goalkeeper who spent two seasons at the club affirmed: “To bring players like Alex, they had to pay them close to what they were earning in their last year in England.” Song became the project’s de facto recruitment engine, drawing on old connections to lure veterans who had wound down their European careers. Salomon Kalou, Carlos Kameni, Alain Traoré and Diafra Sakho all arrived in the following months. Tayoro’s idea was to sign these experienced internationals, who had played at Arsenal, Barcelona, Chelsea, West Ham United and others, in order to build an African powerhouse capable of competing at the continental level. Yet, eight years on, the only thing the club has to show for their massive investment is three domestic league titles. Song and company never made the group stages of the CAF Champions League or the Confederation Cup. Their lowest point came in 2020 during the Confederation Cup preliminary round, when Arta were dismantled 9-1 by a mid-table Egyptian side named Arab Contractors. At the 2023 AFCON, I crossed paths with one of those aging Arta stars on the rooftop terrace of Bushman Café in Abidjan. He spoke with stale bitterness about the environment in Djibouti. He was underwhelmed by the sparse football culture as well as the friction between imported players and local fans, which he attributed in part to colorism. For all the project’s footballing failures, the detail that struck me hardest when doing my yearly league table scroll was that every single one of the 44 remaining fixtures between April and June in Djibouti were scheduled to be played at the El Hadj Hassan Gouled Stadium. That single fact highlights the twistedness of Tayoro’s project. If the idea was to be a net positive for Djiboutian football, he could have invested in infrastructure, academies or lesser known players that were in their athletic primes, instead of aging players that had nothing to offer but their past glories. To be fair, Arta Solar 7 is not an anomaly. It is just the most recent example of failed sportswashing vanity projects that have come to characterize football across the globe. More than a decade ago Anzhi Makhachkala burned through oligarch money in Dagestan, Russia, while Malaga and Almeria used Gulf money for the same short-lived boom in Spain. In each case, politically-adjacent money arrives with shiny promises, bypasses structural needs and exits leaving little behind. If there is a lesson in any of this, it is that African football cannot afford to merely react to these global currents as they arrive. It must anticipate them and build institutions resilient enough to withstand them. If not, these cycles will repeat with different actors and different headlines at different times in the future. – Maher Mezahi, contributing editor | 
