The story most people in Europe know about the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations, if they know anything about it at all, is the one that condensed into a sentence on ’ ticker the morning after the final: hosts Côte d’Ivoire, having sacked their manager halfway through the group stage and survived the round of 16 only after Senegal missed a penalty in the shootout, came from a goal down to beat Nigeria 2-1 at the Stade Olympique Alassane Ouattara on 11 February 2024. The narrative is correct. It is also, as a description of what the tournament represented, almost entirely beside the point.
What the tournament represented, watched closely over its four weeks in Abidjan and Yamoussoukro and Bouaké, was the moment African football’s institutional depth caught up with the quiet European assumption that this was a confederation that produced individual players and not coaching ideas. The Ivorians won at home. They also did so playing the kind of structured, rehearsed, set-piece-literate football that you do not produce in a federation that is making it up as it goes along. South Africa reached the semi-finals under Hugo Broos with a defensive shape that took Morocco’s two best players out of the match in the round of 16. Nigeria reached the final on the strength of a back four coached to a level you would associate with a top-flight European club. The football was good. The football was also, in places, more coherent than what was on offer at Euro 2024 five months later. That is the part the European press has spent fifteen months avoiding.
The Côte d’Ivoire Story That Was More Than a Story
The Ivorian arc has by now been recounted enough times to risk losing its tactical content. The bare facts: Jean-Louis Gasset, the experienced French coach hired to lead the host nation, lost his second group game 1-0 to Nigeria, was beaten 4-0 by Equatorial Guinea in his third, and was sacked a day later. His assistant, the forty-year-old Emerse Faé, a former Reading midfielder who had never managed a senior side, was handed the job. Côte d’Ivoire qualified for the round of 16 only because Morocco’s win over Zambia mathematically rescued one of the third-placed groups. They then beat Senegal, the holders, on penalties; Mali in extra time; DR Congo 1-0 in the semi-final; and Nigeria 2-1 in the final, with Franck Kessié equalising from a corner and Sébastien Haller, who eighteen months earlier had been undergoing chemotherapy for testicular cancer, scoring the winner from Simon Adingra’s left-wing cross.
That is the romance. The tactical story underneath it is more interesting. Faé’s Côte d’Ivoire, in the four matches that mattered, played a 4-2-3-1 with a pressing trigger system that looked nothing like the broken, passive 4-3-3 Gasset had been using. The defensive line stepped up. The full-backs were given specific responsibilities for the wide channels rather than blanket instructions to cover them. Adingra and Max-Alain Gradel were positioned to receive the ball in the half-space rather than chalked permanently to the touchline. The set-piece coaching, by the time the knockout rounds began, was sophisticated enough that two of the team’s three goals against Nigeria came directly from corners. Faé did all of this, with a squad whose confidence had collapsed, in something less than three weeks. The federation had the institutional sense to recognise that the assistant who had been running the analysis cells was the one who understood what the squad needed. It is the kind of decision the FA would not have made in 2024 and possibly will not make in 2026.
The Tactical Headlines
There were four tactical headlines from the tournament, and they were the ones the European coverage either glossed over or ignored entirely.
The first was the level of pressing organisation across the better sides. Nigeria pressed in a 4-3-3 with the front three coordinated to cut central passing lanes and force play wide; the back four held a high line that Victor Osimhen’s hold-up play reinforced from the front. South Africa, under Broos, pressed less aggressively but with the same level of structural coaching, using a mid-block that closed central spaces while inviting wide circulation that their full-backs were drilled to ambush. Côte d’Ivoire, after the Faé reset, used a high press in the knockout rounds that triggered specifically off the opposition centre-back’s first touch. None of this is exotic. All of it requires the kind of repeated session work that takes months, not weeks, to install. It was visible in three different national teams in the same tournament.
The second was the sophistication of the set-piece coaching. CAF tournaments have a reputation in the European press for being technically loose and physically dominated. The reputation is fifteen years out of date. Set-piece routines at AFCON 2023 were rehearsed to a level that bore comparison with what Arsenal and Brentford have spent the last three Premier League seasons being celebrated for. Nigeria’s William Troost-Ekong, who would win the player-of-the-tournament award, scored three of his four tournament goals from set pieces. Côte d’Ivoire scored three from corners across the seven matches. The set-piece literacy was not concentrated in one or two teams; it was distributed across the better halves of the bracket, which is the structural marker that distinguishes a confederation that has invested in coaching from one that has not.
The third was the persistence of defensive structure under pressure. South Africa’s round-of-16 win over Morocco was, watched neutrally, the most accomplished single-match defensive performance of the international football year. Broos asked his side to deny Hakim Ziyech the half-spaces in which he wanted to operate, to force Achraf Hakimi to receive the ball deep enough that his crossing options narrowed, and to pressure Sofyan Amrabat off the ball every time he turned on his weaker foot. Hakimi missed a penalty in the eighty-third minute. Amrabat was sent off. Teboho Mokoena scored from a free-kick. The 2-0 result flattered no one. It was the canonical demonstration that a well-coached African defensive system could neutralise a Moroccan side that had been a World Cup semi-finalist fourteen months earlier, and the European press, on the rare occasions it bothered to cover the match at all, filed it under upset rather than under the tactical lesson it was.
The fourth, and the one I keep returning to, was the depth of the coaching. Faé was a caretaker. Broos was a sixty-something Belgian with a journeyman career. José Peseiro, Nigeria’s manager, had been hired on a discount. None of these were the marquee names that the better-resourced European federations insist on, and all three produced sides that were tactically more coherent than England were six months later at the Euros. The lesson is not that AFCON’s coaches were better than Southgate. The lesson is that the floor of coaching competence at the tournament was higher than the European press has spent fifteen years assuming it was.
The Institutional Argument
Here is the argument the European press has been quietly avoiding. African football has, over the last fifteen years, built coaching and recruitment infrastructure that the rest of world football is now extracting from. Senegal’s Génération Foot academy, a Dakar institution founded in 2000 and tied to FC Metz, has produced Sadio Mané and Ismaïla Sarr and a generation of Ligue 1 starters. Morocco’s Mohammed VI Football Academy, opened in 2009 with royal funding and a sport-study curriculum, has produced Youssef En-Nesyri and Nayef Aguerd and most of the squad that reached a World Cup semi-final in 2022. The Ivorian academies in Abidjan have been producing Champions League regulars for two decades. The structures are not new. The institutional density has, however, reached a point where the federations are no longer simply exporting players to Europe; they are also producing coaching staff, analysis cells, and tournament-management capacity that European national teams would be improved by hiring into.
The European press has, with a small number of honourable exceptions, persisted in treating African football as a player-exporting region whose tournaments are tactically unserious and whose coaching is provincial. The coverage of AFCON in the major British and Italian outlets in January and February 2024 was, with a few exceptions at the and embarrassing. There were Premier League managers complaining about losing players for a month. There were transfer-window features that dwarfed match reports. There was the standing assumption, which I do not remember anyone interrogating in print, that the tournament was something that happened in the background to the more important business of the European club season. Watching the football, this assumption was demonstrably false. Reading the coverage, you would not have known.
What the Game Should Have Noticed
The Côte d’Ivoire story, told as a story, ends with Haller’s flick from Adingra’s cross and the trophy in Abidjan. Told as a tactical story, it ends with a more useful set of conclusions.
The first is that the gap between the best CAF national teams and the better UEFA national teams, on the pitch, is smaller than the European press has been willing to write. Morocco were a 2022 World Cup semi-finalist. Nigeria, at AFCON 2023, played football that France struggled to play four months later under Didier Deschamps. The gap, where it exists, is one of squad depth and individual quality at the very top end. It is not a gap of tactical sophistication, and pretending it is one, fifteen years after Stephen Keshi was outcoaching half of Europe’s national-team managers, is a lazy editorial assumption the football press should by now have moved past.
The second is that the European clubs that have invested most aggressively in African scouting and recruitment over the last decade — Brighton, Lille, Lens, Salzburg, the Brentford analytics group — have done so because they understand something the broadsheet football press has not caught up with. The structural value being produced by African federations is not just in players. It is in the coaching that develops those players. It is in the academy networks that have institutionalised technical training to a level that the more historically resourced confederations have been complacent about. The clubs scouting AFCON in January 2024 were not simply looking at Adingra and Mokoena. They were also looking at the staff coaching them.
The third is this. Football has been told, persistently and from a particular set of commercial directions, that the future of the game is concentrated in a small number of European leagues and an expanding Saudi project. Both of those narratives serve interests that are not the game’s. The future of the game, as a tactical and institutional matter, is also being built in places the European press has decided not to take seriously. AFCON 2023 was one of the clearer demonstrations of this we have had in a decade. The right response, on the part of anyone who covers the sport for a living, is not to wait for AFCON 2025 in Morocco to revisit the question. It is to take the lesson now.
The trophy is in Abidjan. The lesson is everywhere else.