The 2015 African Cup of Nations has come and gone and following two weeks of intense encounters, stalemates, drama, sweat, tears and joy, Côte d’Ivoire were crowned as the deserving kings of African football. While many would think, and rightly so, that Côte d’Ivoire’s final victory owed very much to the array of talents in a team, which featured among others the Toure brothers, Serge Aurier or Solomon Kalou, few realize the destiny of the West African team was shaped more than 20 years ago when an ambitious plan in capacity building within Ivoirian football was put into place.
In 1996, former French international Jean Marc Guillou teamed up with legendary Abidjan-based football club ASEC Mimosa to launch a local football academy, which came to be known as Académie Sol béni (blessed soil). This was a boarding school-styled football academy, with teaching being focused on equipping them for life as football professionals in Europe. The focus was on building key values, teaching foreign languages like English and Spanish and life-skills like signing contracts, buying apartments and living away from home.
In a 2006 interview to Fifa.com website, Ivoirian football great Didier Drogba said he was fully aware that the success of the Elephants (the Ivoirian national team) came “down to the training policy put in place in the early 1990s by Asec. At the time it wasn’t the normal thing to do. Asec created the first real football school”.
It might not have been the ‘normal thing to do’ but the final results speak for themselves and show what results can be achieved in any field, including sports and football, when potential and capacity gaps are identified and capacitation plans put in place and implemented to fill those gaps and realize said potential. In the case of Côte d’Ivoire it has proven a winning formula and the programme’s impact on the national football team has been felt for many years. As of the country’s participation to the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany, two thirds of the Elephants’ players were graduates of the Académie Sol béni. And in 2015, the spine of the team that has just claimed Africa’s football crown was made up of the remainder of those graduates. The impact has also been felt regionally.
Over the last few years, the Sol béni model has been adopted by other African football powers willing to build on the success of a system which capacitates players, football clubs and national teams to achieve success. Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Madagascar and, most recently, Mali have all set up similar academies on their soil in the hope of nurturing burgeoning talents and reaching the heights of continental and world football.
However, and despite proven track records, the model has limits, which are mostly exposed when it is not fully embraced by governments and key actors in local football circles. For instance, few African countries invest money into their footballing structures, and in the meantime sponsorship of clubs have dwindled as well as attendance and advertising revenues, making it precarious for African football to try and develop football talent on limited budget. To survive, clubs are often forced to sell their best players to the highest bidders, precociously depriving the local leagues of the very ingredient to creating revenue flows: talented players.
There lies the challenge: finding a way to encourage capacity building in African football while at the same time making the sport financially viable at the local level. The future of African football and its structures lies in finding such a thin balance.
Prof. Emmanuel Nnadozie is the Executive Secretary of The African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF) in Harare, Zimbabwe.
