Ivory Coast’s AFCON victory: From grass to grace, another reason to trust in homegrown coaches

Everyone had written off the Ivorians in the African Cup of Nation (AFCON) 2023, following their early setbacks at the group stage. A campaign that saw them part ways with their coach, Jean-Louis Gasset after a dismall performance that saw them hammered 4 – 0 by Equatorial Guinea.

Fast forward, few weeks later, the Elephants are top of the African football pyramid, as champions of the continent. 

Ivory Coast players celebrate winning the AFCON

|© Aljazeera |

The Ivorians toiled through the tournament’s knockout stages, in a dramatic fashion, escaping with the luckiest of scorelines. They knocked out the tournament’s favourites in Senegal, the defending champions, via penalty shootouts after a miraculous 1-1 draw.

The West African giant had initially entrusted Jean-Louis Gasset, a foreigner, with the task of seeing the team triumphant at the AFCON 2023. That idea fell flat.

Step in Emerse Fae, “the son of the soil” and fair to say, he delivered the Ivorians to the promised land. The fact that the Ivorian Football Association put their faith in one of their own, after disappointments in their foreign choice, was commendable.

Many African countries, including Kenya, prefer to assign foreigners when it comes to matters national team management, turning a blind eye to the local talents available in their respective nations.

Africa has some of the best mangers of talents, justified by the recent heights achieved by African nations at the international stages as seen at the last World Cup with Cameroon and Morocco.

Trusting in local coaches is a bold move, better said than done. But nations like Senegal among other West African nations have proved it is possible to deliver.

With a home-based tactician in the fold, a nation has many things under control, budget wise, as they will not demand large sums of cash in their contracts.

Kenya had previously employed a local tactician in Francis Kimanzi, and fair to say, he flew the Kenyan flag higher in his first stint as the national team head coach.

Most African football governing bodies believe in employing foreigners, with Europeans taking a lions share in the percentage of head-coaches in the African continent.

According to the Premium Times, a Nigerian newspaper;

The 2024 AFCON tournament has exposed the myth of the superiority of foreign coaches over African coaches in managing African football teams. Foreign coaches have not outperformed their African counterparts in the 36 matches that were played at the group stage. Indeed, in one crucial dimension — topping a group, which is a measure of how good a team is — African coaches have been superior to foreign coaches. Nine of the sixteen teams that qualified for the next round are led by African coaches.

This represents a success rate of 64 percent, when measured in terms of the number of teams that are led by African coaches. Even though this is less than the 70 percent success rate of foreign coaches, five of the teams that topped the six groups at the group stage (Equatorial Guinea, Cape Verde, Senegal, Mali, and Morocco) are coached by Africans. Indeed, tiny Cape Verde and Equatorial Guinea are led by local coaches and have been the standout performers of the tournament.

Credit ||a pull-out from Premium Times

It is high time that Africans start to believe in their talents the same way the European, the South and North Americans, the Asians and to some extent, the Arab nations who have put their faith in home-based national team managers.