Long-form reading for the imaginary ppls:

https://theathletic.com/3040813/2022/01/08/why-afcon-matters/

If we wish to properly understand the importance of the Africa Cup of Nations, we should start by looking at a map of the world.
To be more specific, at a map of the world that uses the Gall-Peters projection, which scales land according to the true surface area of the planet.
Look at it. Africa is HUGE.

There is nothing, and never has been, anything “little” about a football tournament that involves nations from an area of the world as large, storied and diverse as Africa. Misguided (or “ironic”) jokes from Jurgen Klopp or not.
The continent covers 11.7 million square miles. That’s nearly three times the size of Europe. Africa is a space that can hold the landmasses of the United States, China and India combined, and still have room for more. Twenty per cent of the earth’s landmass is Africa.
Once you appreciate Africa’s size, then you must note the shapes within it.
There is a joke from comedian Ahir Shah in which the audience is asked to look at a map of Africa and compare its nation’s borders to those of the rest of the world. If an extra-terrestrial looked at a map of the world, they would surely ask why European and South American nations have borders that correspond neatly to mountain ranges or rivers, while the ones in Africa tend to involve more straight lines.
Africa’s colonial scars are plain to see, every single day, no matter how much former colonial powers would care to forget.
Africa is old but simultaneously young. Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African country to achieve independence on March 6, 1957. So in just under two months’ time, it will be 65 years of age.
After size and shape, let’s consider some numbers.
There are 54 countries in Africa today, according to the United Nations. The combined population of the continent was thought to be 1.3 billion people — roughly 16 per cent of the world’s population. It is estimated there are more than 2,000 distinct languages spoken on the continent, compared to the estimated 300 thought to be spoken in Europe.
Every international football tournament is its own rite of passage for every football fan. The world that existed for last summer’s European Championship was very different to the world that existed for its previous edition five years earlier.
You, the reader, will go into the 2022 World Cup in November with a different understanding of the game than the one you had while watching the previous iteration in 2018. Football changes and develops; its leading protagonists (and antagonists) age and retire, to be replaced with new ones.
Each tournament sees a time where the connection between football watcher and football player morphs and evolves. The connections that occur with the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) can be markedly different to the ones European football fans may have previously encountered.
“For young football fans, the first major tournaments are a crash-course in geography, and it is then when you become aware that, yes, a whole wide world exists out there,” says Salim Masoud Said, a writer on African football.

Burkina Faso fans at their side’s 1998 AFCON semi-final against Egypt (Photo: Eric Cabanis/AFP via Getty Images)

“AFCON is the first major football tournament I remember watching during my childhood in Tanzania. That makes it very personal. I recall Burkina Faso, hosts of the 1998 edition, receiving their third-place medals as one of my early football memories.
“That may not be significant to many, but it was significant to me because before that tournament I had never heard of the country.”
Football’s ability to open doors and tell stories from worlds unlike ours is well known, but there is still, unfortunately, a dismissal of the potential of AFCON from some in sections of the football community.
Earlier this month, former West Ham striker Sebastien Haller was asked if he would prefer to stay with his title-chasing Dutch club Ajax to start 2022 rather than go to Cameroon and compete in the tournament with Ivory Coast. His response was to the point. “This question shows the disrespect for Africa,” he said. “Would this question ever get asked to a European player ahead of the Euros? Of course I am going to the Africa Cup.”
Former England striker Ian Wright would go on to say media coverage of the tournament “is completely tinged with racism”, Senegal-born Crystal Palace manager Patrick Vieira has urged those in the football media to “go to Africa and interview people to really understand what it means for every single one of them”.

Didier Drogba at the group draw for this Africa Cup of Nations last August (Photo: Daniel Beloumou Olomo/AFP via Getty Images)

“When we moved to the UK as a family, the biennial AFCON editions were, for a few weeks, a wonderful way for my family and I to reconnect with the continent and our roots,” adds Said. “Those would be the times, more than any other, when stories of football in Africa from my father and other family members would drift down, and when, in a split second, my father would go from being wowed to lamenting the technical quality on show.”
Said’s final point is something often mentioned by critics of the tournament.
You may have heard the old refrains: AFCON is too disruptive to the European football calendar. It should move to a June/July cycle. AFCON should happen every four years, instead of two. The quality of pitches used in the competition is bad, as are the goalkeepers. African football is corrupt and money often goes missing.
So, for the doubters, here goes…
Yes, there are legitimate safety concerns over this tournament going ahead both during a global pandemic and while an undeclared civil war threatens the lives of many in its host nation.
Such safety fears can feel like a prerequisite before any AFCON commences.

Cameroon was meant to host the previous edition in 2019, but the Anglophone crisis that now threatens this one led to the nation being stripped of that honour, with Egypt stepping in.
Something similar occurred in 2017, when it was staged in Gabon rather than the original choice, Libya. Morocco was supposed to hold the 2015 tournament but the Ebola virus epidemic saw it moved to Equatorial Guinea at the last moment.
As mentioned above, Africa’s colonial scars are plain to see, but there are new wounds still making themselves known to the world.
AFCONs can, and have been, dangerous tournaments to attend and this aspect should not be underplayed. However, we should always try to place said fears within a wider context. If there are questions to be raised about the spread of COVID-19 in Cameroon this year, we should also ask questions about how accessible the vaccines are to African nations, for example.
AFCON is a distinct competition, often to the frustration of fans and football coaches based in Europe.
In its 65 years of competition (this will be the 33rd iteration), it has rarely made itself more malleable to Western viewers. The 2013 edition did, however, move to odd-numbered years to avoid clashing with the World Cup (whoops!) and in 2019 it was held in June and July rather than January and February, which led to many a player wilting in the Egyptian summer heat.

Mola, the AFCON 2021 mascot, on a trophy tour around host nation Cameroon’s capital Yaounde this week (Photo: Daniel Beloumou Olomo/AFP via Getty Images)

There have been 14 winners, with Egypt the most successful nation with seven titles (three of which were won consecutively between 2006 and 2010). Samuel Eto’o, who scored a tournament-record 18 goals for Cameroon across his six AFCONs recently told The Athletic that greater education and collaboration are required for African football to take the next step, rather than there being a lack of talent on the continent.
AFCON is different. It has to be. It is made to be.
You can hear it in the rendition of the national anthems before every game as players, coaches and fans belt out songs of national pride and freedom.
There’s always a story. You cannot cover an Africa Cup of Nations in the same way one might cover a World Cup or a European Championship. AFCON is the tournament of surprise winners, chaotic penalty shootouts and where a “golden generation” is no guarantee of success (just ask Didier Drogba and Ivory Coast).
Expected goals stats cannot quantify what Aristide Bance did in the previous decade.
Bance has one of the more eclectic ranges of clubs you will ever see on a footballer’s Wikipedia page, ranging from Cape Town to Kazakhstan via stops in Ukraine, Ivory Coast, Finland, Qatar, Latvia, Egypt, Germany and more, but for two shining AFCONs he was one of the most dangerous footballers ever to set foot on grass (or the other questionable materials that have covered AFCON pitches), with his goals taking Burkina Faso to the final in 2013 and the bronze medal four years later.

Aristide Bance celebrates Burkina Faso’s win over Tunisia in the 2017 quarter-finals (Photo: Olivier Ebanga/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Due to the lack of infrastructure in African football, there is not the mass industrialisation of footballing talent at grassroots and academy levels that we now take as the norm in Europe.
Only a competition such as AFCON could lead to two separate investigations into players using witchcraft to gain an advantage.
If you want a uniquely AFCON story, Mali were once eliminated via the drawing of lots — and not in the dim and distant past but in 2015.
No other tournament can manifest performances as brilliant as Ndaye Mulamba’s 1974 AFCON, when he managed to score nine goals across six games, including a final that went to a replay, for Zaire (now DR Congo), prompting journalist and author Dipo Faloyin to remark, “I’m not sure Africa’s fragile internal politics could take a player doing something so outrageously provocative again.”
To properly understand AFCON is to know the story of Kalusha Bwalya, the only Zambian to win African Player of the Year in 1988, but who lost 18 of his international team-mates in a 1993 air crash in Gabon. Bwalya and Zambia would come up just short in the 1994 and 1996 editions of the tournament, only to finally triumph in 2012.
There is a photograph of Bwalya — by then the president of the Zambian FA — as he collects the trophy on behalf of the team who had just won it, and the team he lost years prior. Study his face and you will understand the power of his tournament.
“He deserved that moment, to stand on the house he rebuilt,” wrote Faloyin.

Kalusha Bwalya holds the trophy aloft after Zambia beat Ivory Coast on penalties in the 2012 AFCON final (Photo: Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)

This AFCON will, again, be different.
Twenty-four teams will compete, after AFCON upsized from 16 in 2019. Several former heavyweights are approaching the ends of their supposed “golden generations” while countries including Nigeria, Algeria, Egypt and Morocco appear to be entering their prime.
Thanks to FIFA rule changes in 2020 — introduced in part thanks to the work of the football federations in Algeria and Morocco — there are more first, second and third-generation immigrants playing for their mother nations. If he can recover from COVID-19, Paris-born Manchester United youngster Hannibal Mejbri could have a breakout tournament for Tunisia.
This month’s matches will not be like the football you typically see in Europe or South America. It has its own internal rhythms and playing styles, unique in time signature and tactics.
Every time an Africa Cup of Nations arrives, you will see sceptics and doubters try to underplay its importance to the wider footballing landscape.
But you cannot bury an AFCON tournament, for it is a seed of unbridled footballing joy.