MANY football lovers hope an African team will finally win the men’s 2022 Fifa World Cup. The world has been waiting for this since the great Brazilian player Pelé predicted (in the 1970s) that an African country would win before the year 2000. That didn’t happen, but it didn’t stop Patrice Motsepe, president of the Confederation of African Football, from saying (in 2021): An African team must win the World Cup in the near future.
But is it realistic to keep hoping? Are African teams doing what they need to compete with the world’s best, making it just a matter of time? Or is an African win possible if countries do something different? Or is an African win simply impossible, the stuff of false hope?
I tackle this multi-part question in a recent research paper that draws on various data sources (including the Elo ratings database) to compare competitive records in the 2010s. It looks at top African contenders
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