Africa Is a Country

Christmas Day for Football Fans

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Christmas Day for Football Fans

By
Sean Henry Jacobs

Football is a Country's Elliot Ross has describes the World Cup Final, every four years, as Christmas Day for football fans, just better. The champion this time is Germany.

James Rodriguez, probably the best Colombian player of his generation, takes on Brazil's defense during a match at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Photo via WikiCommons.

So there you have it. After 120 minutes and a great goal by Mario Goetze (whose name will now be part of German lore like Gert Muller and Andreas Brehme), Germany are World champions. It’s been a magical month. But it is also basically the last time (till the next World Cup in four years) for journalists and pundits (yes, that’s a real profession now) to trot out cliches for a while about Messi’s “magic” versus the “German machine.”

Tomorrow we’ll return to our lives, especially Brazilians who have to pay the bill for FIFA’s untaxed profits, rebuild their football reputation from scratch (start by firing Scolari) and can’t hide their business behind empty slogans of mixing anymore. So now we have a summer of expensive, meaningless friendlies between top European club teams featuring their reserves playing in Asia and North America coming up, and the English media (and 101 great goals) convincing us all over again of the superiority of the Premier League. Which is a good time to remind ourselves that most people play the game away from advertising boards or without pundits and close-ups.

A Football Dreams tryout in Thiès, Senegal.

Further Reading

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.

Whose game is remembered?

The Women’s Africa Cup of Nations opens in Morocco amid growing calls to preserve the stories, players, and legacy of the women who built the game—before they’re lost to erasure and algorithm alike.