On the night Paris Saint-Germain finally won the European Cup last May, the camera that mattered, in the seconds after the whistle in Munich, settled on Achraf Hakimi, who had scored the opening goal of a 5-0 demolition of Internazionale, standing with his palms open and the Moroccan flag draped on his shoulders. Two thousand miles south, at the same hour, the Académie Génération Foot in Dakar — the institution that produced Sadio Mané, Ismaïla Sarr, Pape Matar Sarr and Lamine Camara — was running a training session on a pitch with no drainage, in a country whose national stadium has spent more of the last decade closed for refurbishment than open for football. The asymmetry was not new. It was simply, in 2025, more visible than usual.
This is not a piece about how unfair it all is. The case for African players’ decisive contribution to twenty-first-century European football has been made often enough that anyone who still wants to argue it is not arguing in good faith. Salah holds the all-time goalscoring record for an African player in the Premier League, currently on 192 league goals — fourth in the competition’s history behind Shearer, Kane and Rooney, and a record that, after his announced departure from Liverpool this summer, will outlast him. Mané has 111 league goals; Drogba 104. Hakimi is the right-back the elite-level tactical conversation uses as reference point. Osimhen moved from Napoli to Galatasaray last summer for a Turkish-record €75m. Lookman moved from Atalanta to Atlético Madrid in February for £30.3m, eighteen months after scoring three in a Europa League final. Kudus, after two seasons at West Ham, is now at Tottenham for £55m. The Premier League’s African line is no longer a line of useful supplements. It is the line that produces the goals.
What this piece is about is the institutional accounting that has not been done. The pipelines that produced these players — Génération Foot in Senegal, Right to Dream in Ghana, the JMG network in Côte d’Ivoire and Mali, ASEC Mimosas in Abidjan — have built more functioning football architecture, on smaller budgets, than any of the elite European academies the football press treats as serious institutions. They have done it with private money, without meaningful state support, under the cosh of CAF’s own structural failures. They have, decade after decade, watched the players they produced enter European football at a fraction of the price European clubs were willing to pay each other for less. The continent is not a victim. It is a creditor whose ledger has never been formally read.
The Pipelines
Génération Foot was founded in 2000 by Mady Touré, a Senegalese businessman and former player, and named for his father Amara. Three years later it entered the FC Metz partnership that has functioned as its outlet to European football for two decades. Mané was signed by Metz in 2011, sold to Salzburg in 2012 for €4m, sold on to Southampton in 2014, and from there to the career we know. Sarr followed the same route. Pape Matar Sarr followed it. Habib Diallo followed it. Lamine Camara, the most recent breakout, went from Metz to Monaco in 2024. The model is simple. Génération Foot identifies the players; Metz is the route to first-team minutes; the clubs that pay the real money are the ones the player joins next, and Génération Foot’s share of those second sales is modest.
Right to Dream has, in institutional terms, gone furthest. Founded in 1999 by Tom Vernon, a former Manchester United scout in West Africa who spent his early Ghanaian years coaching boys in his own house, the academy ran for sixteen years as a residential school in Accra before, in 2015, doing what no African football institution had ever done: it bought a European top-flight club. FC Nordsjælland, in Denmark, has now been Right to Dream’s senior team for a decade. Kudus came through it. Kamaldeen Sulemana came through it. The academy also owns FC Masar in Egypt and is part of the consortium that founded San Diego FC, all under the Mansour Group umbrella. Vernon stepped down from the boards last year. The institution he built remains the only African-founded organisation that owns and operates a senior European club; it is worth dwelling on the strangeness of the sentence. In twenty-five years of African players being the engine of European football, only one African organisation has ever acquired the means to monetise that work at the European end.
The JMG network is older and more diffuse. Jean-Marc Guillou, the former France international whose role in Arsène Wenger’s early career has been extensively rehearsed, founded the first JMG academy in 1994 in Abidjan; the academy he and Roger Ouégnin developed together at ASEC Mimosas from 1993 — Mimosas being the dominant Ivorian club and 1998 CAF Champions League winners — produced the spine of the Ivorian golden generation. Yaya Touré. Kolo Touré. Salomon Kalou. Emmanuel Eboué. Didier Zokora. Gervinho. Romaric. Odilon Kossounou. The JMG network later expanded into Mali, Madagascar, Egypt and Thailand; its alumni list also includes Yves Bissouma and Amadou Haidara. Guillou’s philosophy — barefoot training, weak-foot dominance, technical security under pressure — was not a marketing line. It was a coaching method that produced, at one point, four Premier League starting centre-backs and a Champions League-winning midfielder from a single academy intake.
These four are not the whole picture. They are simply the ones whose outputs have been most visible, and whose models would, if European football were honest about its supply chains, be discussed at the same conferences where the academies of Madrid and Munich are discussed. They are not.
The Export Waves
The history of Africans in European football arrives, when sorted, in four waves. The 1990s pioneers — George Weah, who won the Ballon d’Or in 1995 after his Monaco-PSG-Milan run, the only African player ever to have won it; Abedi Pelé, whose Marseille produced the first European Cup win by a French club in 1993 — established that the African player could be the best player in a Champions League-winning side. They did not, mostly, change recruitment. They were treated as exceptional individuals, the way European football has always treated South American imports as exceptional individuals, and the structural lesson was not drawn.
The 2000s establishment wave did the work. Drogba at Chelsea. The Touré brothers at Arsenal and then City. Michael Essien. Samuel Eto’o, scoring in two consecutive Champions League finals on the winning side. By the end of the decade the question was no longer whether African players could perform in European football but whether European clubs were paying enough for them, and the answer was that they were not. Drogba arrived at Chelsea from Marseille for £24m, a record African transfer fee at the time, which looks now like the bargain of a century.
The 2010s produced the modern superstars. Salah’s arc — Basel to Chelsea to Roma to Liverpool, the second move backwards before the third move forwards, then the Premier League’s African scoring record. Mané at Salzburg, Southampton, Liverpool, Bayern, Al-Nassr. Riyad Mahrez winning the title at Leicester in 2016 in one of the great individual seasons. Aubameyang, Gabonese though born in Laval, at Dortmund and Arsenal. The fees were going up. The structural credit was not.
The 2020s have produced the peer-of-the-elite era. Hakimi has spent his last seven seasons at Real Madrid, Dortmund, Inter and now PSG, and there has not been a serious tactical conversation in those years that has placed any other right-back ahead of him. Osimhen dragged Napoli to a Scudetto in 2023 before his Galatasaray move. Lookman won the Europa League with Atalanta in 2024 with a hat-trick in the final against Bayer Leverkusen — the same Leverkusen at whose centre stands Edmond Tapsoba, the Burkinabé whose move to one of the elite Premier League sides is currently being negotiated through the press. Kudus has been Tottenham’s most expensive signing since the Bale era. Saka, eligible for England through Ealing rather than Lagos but Yoruba on both sides, is the player Arsenal have built four years of their project around. None of these players are useful supplements. They are the spine.
The Tactical Fingerprints
What does African-trained football, distinct from European-trained football, consistently bring to the elite-level matchday squad? Three things, watched across enough matches to argue for them as patterns rather than coincidences.
The first is the carrier athlete: the player who, given the ball in his own half under pressure, takes it forty yards up the pitch through traffic. Hakimi does this. Kudus does this. Lookman does this. The skill is partly physical, partly a decision-making security under contact that European academies, which over-coach the safe pass, do not produce as reliably. JMG’s barefoot training was not a romance; it produced players who could keep the ball with the outside of either foot at full sprint while a centre-back was leaning on them. Salah, who came through El Mokawloon and Basel, is the carrier athlete in its elite expression.
The second is technical security under pressure in tight zones. Osimhen’s hold-up play under direct centre-back contact is a JMG-philosophy attribute Osimhen acquired without ever attending a JMG academy, which says something about the broader West African coaching culture from which it has spread. Kudus, in a Premier League where most number tens have been coached to release the ball before being tackled, will receive facing his own goal, take the contact, and turn into space the defender thought he had closed.
The third is set-piece imposition, which European football has quietly relied on for fifteen years and never credited. The aerial dominance of African centre-backs and centre-forwards in their penalty boxes — Yaya Touré at City, Kolo at Liverpool, Tapsoba now at Leverkusen, Osimhen on attacking corners — has been the structural advantage around which several Premier League and Bundesliga sides have organised whole set-piece programmes. Pyramids’ CAF Champions League win last month, beating Mamelodi Sundowns 3-2 on aggregate, was decided in part by exactly this kind of coaching. The continent produces it. European football monetises it.
The Asymmetric Value Extraction
Now the accounting. Salah cost Liverpool £36.9m from Roma in 2017. He has, on any reasonable estimate, generated several hundred million pounds in shirt sales, broadcast equity, prize money and commercial visibility, and is the single most important Liverpool footballer of the post-Gerrard era. The Egyptian Football Association did not receive a structural cut of those revenues; CAF did not; El Mokawloon, the club at which Salah came through, received a percentage of the Basel sale and nothing of the subsequent ones.
Mané, sold by Génération Foot to Metz in 2011, generated subsequent transfer activity in the order of €100m across the Salzburg, Southampton, Liverpool and Bayern moves. Génération Foot’s share of those subsequent moves, while it exists in private agreements, is small. The academy still trains players on pitches the local rains turn into clay. Right to Dream is the single African institution that has bridged this gap, by buying a European club, and the gap remains so wide that the bridging looks like a freak event rather than a model.
The broadcast revenue figures are starker. The Premier League’s domestic and international broadcast cycle runs to roughly £12bn over three seasons. CAF’s combined commercial and broadcast revenue, on the most generous reading of available figures, is below £100m a year. The Premier League’s revenue is, in part, subsidised by African players whose wages CAF cannot pay. The pipeline is one-directional. The money runs north.
What CAF Still Does Badly
It would be dishonest to write this piece without saying that the continental governing body is part of the problem. CAF has, for thirty years, run a Champions League whose schedule contradicts itself, a Confederation Cup whose financial returns to participating clubs are derisory, and an AFCON whose calendar is set around the convenience of European clubs rather than the development of African ones. The federations themselves, in too many countries, have been captured by political interests that treat the national team as a vanity project and the domestic league as an afterthought. The pipelines that work — Génération Foot, Right to Dream, JMG, ASEC — work despite their federations rather than because of them. A serious argument about extraction has to begin with the fact that the receiving end has not been organised to resist it. But the failure of CAF to organise itself does not absolve European football of walking into the gap. It explains why the walking has been so easy.
The Footnote
The history of football, when written by Europeans, has a recurring structural habit. It treats the great African player as a moment of personal arrival rather than as the surfacing tip of an institutional iceberg. Weah was a personal story. Drogba was a personal story. Salah, at the moment of writing, is being eulogised in the British press as a personal story — a great Liverpool man, a great Egyptian, a great competitor — without sustained engagement with the structural fact that he is the latest in a line of African players who have shaped the modern Premier League and that the Premier League has, in return, given the continent that produced them almost nothing.
The older football writers — Glanville, McIlvanney, the generation that read Galeano and thought about football as a thing with political and economic edges — would at least have named the asymmetry. They would not have written the obituary of Mohamed Salah’s Liverpool career without mentioning Mady Touré, or Tom Vernon, or Jean-Marc Guillou, or any of the four or five names that constitute the actual institutional answer to how the modern Premier League came to be the league it is. They would have understood that the footnote was the story.
The pipelines are still running. Génération Foot will produce another Lamine Camara before the decade is out. Right to Dream will produce another Kudus. JMG will produce another carrier athlete who arrives in Ligue 1 at twenty and is in the Champions League at twenty-three. The institutional accounting will, on present evidence, continue not to be done. The least we can do is stop pretending that the continent that has provided the modern game with its best winger, its best right-back, its best centre-forward of the last five years and its most expensive recent Premier League signing has done so by accident. It has done so by building things. The things should be named. The names should be the lede, not the closing paragraph.