Is the future of football Black?

In the 1980s and 90s, you would be amazed to see even one Black player in any European national squad – or, for that matter, even in club football. In the just-completed World Cup, Black players were everywhere, doing fantastic things. Are players of African descent set to dominate the game globally?

So football did not come home (to England) after all, 60 years after 1966. It went to Spain. And who can cry for Argentina except the greatest player of our time, Lionel Messi, saying his farewell to us? He wept as Spain, playing the kind of football that leaves opponents awed, became the team that didn’t know how to lose.

Spain were awesome – conceding just one goal throughout the tournament and adding to their impressive 38-game unbeaten run, stretching back to 2024. They deserve every inch of their world title. Reducing Argentina to a miserly two attempts at goal and zero on target, while you pile up 20 attempts at goal and 12 on target in 120 minutes of a World Cup final, is simply out of this world. Well done, Spain.

For England, it was the same old, same old. Shattered! Suddenly their history at the World Cup was being played in technicolour. 1990 failure, beaten by West Germany in the semi-final on penalties (the match ended 1-1 in extra time, with Italy beating them 2-1 in the third-place playoff).

2018 failure, beaten 2-1 by Croatia in the semi-final and losing 0-2 to Belgium in the third-place playoff.

2022 failure, beaten 2-1 by France in the quarter-final.

2026 failure, beaten 2-1 by Argentina in the semi-final, but winning 6-4 against France in a pulsating third-place playoff.

England led 4-0 at half time in this match, but somehow forgot how to play in the second half, allowing France (that changed four players and brought on their usual cavalry during the interval) to score three scintillating goals to make it 4-3, before England, hanging on by the skin of their teeth, scored their fifth goal through a penalty, only for France to hit back with their fourth goal and threaten to score more, and just when everyone thought France were going to give a now hapless England a sucker punch, the English remembered how to score and indeed scored their sixth goal with the last kick of the match in 97 minutes. What a match? Ten goals in 97 minutes!

The New African editor, Anver Versi’s post-match summation, which he sent to me via WhatsApp, has to be immortalised: “Brilliant, wonderful game with superb individual performances. England won the first half, France the second. Olise’s misses and two final goals settled it for England. Enjoyed every minute. Sometimes people put too much emphasis on results as if this is war. It’s a game, public entertainment played and watched for pleasure, providing thrills and spills and ecstasy and agony, but no one is killed, no children are starved. The media make too much of it. This is England’s best performance in 20 plus years, and yet, they carp as if they were favourites. They have only won it once, at home in 1966; like Uruguay. If they had the record of Brazil, Argentina, Germany, or France, they can feel aggrieved.”

Precisely what the American sportswriter, Roger Bennett, argued. He said the England failures listed above were “all noble failures, but agonising ones … Twas always thus, and always thus will be,” Bennett added, making it sound like a jinx, an English whodunit in bright-pink football boots. A colleague in London added that “England have nothing to be ashamed of; they played the best they were capable of. It was just not good enough to defeat Argentina in the semi-final.”

So the South Americans waved goodbye to the world, crying. It brought the hit song, “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” into focus because, as Andrew Lloyd Webber rendered it, “It won’t be easy. You’ll think it strange. When I try to explain how I feel. That I still need your love. After all that I’ve done. You won’t believe me. All you will see. Is a girl you once knew. Although she’s dressed up to the nines. At sixes and sevens with you.”

Poor Argentina. Some of their anguished players put up a disgusting show after the final whistle, fighting the Spaniards. Let it not happen again. This is not the Falklands War.

Argentina’s forward #10 Lionel Messi cries during the trophy ceremony at the end of the 2026 World Cup football tournament final match between Spain and Argentina at the New York/New Jersey Stadium in East Rutherford on July 19, 2026. (Photo by Paul ELLIS / AFP)

Players of African descent dominate

Now, let me turn to my real subject for this week. Is football’s future black? Black as in people of African heritage playing all over the world? Maybe I am pushing the envelope too far. But didn’t it pleasantly hit you that the just-ended World Cup was overly dominated by players of African descent? Let’s just call them Black.

Canada’s team was almost all black. Ditto USA, whose president, Donald J. Trump, can even get FIFA to suspend a red card suspension of a Black player of Nigerian descent playing for the USA – Folarin Balogun.

Mexico had one excellent Black forward, one of the best of the team, Julián Quiñones, an Afro-Colombian naturalised Mexican citizen.

Panama was almost all Black. We won’t talk about Curacao, Haiti, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador. These are strong African-heritage football nations. And their Black players were at the World Cup in full force.

From the look of things, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay have not heard the news about Black players, so we will leave them so. I will do a special Beefs in the next few weeks showing why Argentina, having deliberately wiped out its black population in the 1800s by government policy, parades itself across the world as an all-White country. Shame.

History tells us that Argentina’s drive to decrease its Black population was a project of several decades of social engineering known as blanqueamiento (or whitening). It started in the mid-19th century, accelerated considerably under President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, who was in office between 1868 and 1874, and continued substantially into the 20th century. Imagine. Annihilating Blacks to make the country White.

But let’s get back to World Cup 2026. Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland – all were full of excellent Black players in significant numbers who usually were the leading lights of their teams.

In Asia, we saw Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and even Japan (their superb goalkeeper, Zion Suzuki, has Ghanaian origins) parading their Black players as a badge of honour. Australia and New Zealand were not left out.

The odd ones out were Croatia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Czech Republic,

Turkey, South Korea and Uzbekistan – six out of 48 countries who had no Black players on the field of play.

How times have changed

Times have indeed changed. In the 1980s and 90s, when we got one Black footballer in a European team, Black people celebrated. He was our light. But not anymore. Today, Black players dominate everywhere, on pure merit, as evidenced by the 2026 World Cup.

In 1986, I was a student in Paris, and as France prepared for that year’s World Cup, there was a lone Black player in their squad: Jean Tigana, a consummate midfielder of Malian origins with a cultured left foot. We celebrated Tigana!

In 1998, when France won the World Cup for the first time, there were eight Black players in the 23-man squad: Bernard Lam, Patrick Vieira, Marcel Desailly, Thierry Henry, Bernard Diomède, Lilian Thuram, Christian Karembeu, and Christophe Dugarry. The French team was turning black.

In 2018, when France won the World Cup for the second time, there were 14 Black players in the 23-man squad: Paul Pogba, Kylian Mbappé, N’Golo Kanté, Blaise Matuidi, Samuel Umtiti, Ousmane Dembélé, Benjamin Mendy, Presnel Kimpembe, Corentin Tolisso, Steven N’Zonzi, Steve Mandanda, Adil Rami, Djibril Sidibé, and Raphaël Varane.

In 2022, there were 17 black players in France’s 23-man World Cup squad. In 2026, there were 21 Black players in their 23-man squad. Stunning.

No wonder, when the former Paraguayan goalkeeper Jose Luis Chilavert wanted to hit back at Christophe Dugarry for saying that Paraguay would get hammered by France in their Group of 16 match, Chilavert said Paraguay would face a “squad from ‌Africa”, a sarcastic reference to the French team that is now almost entirely Black 40 years after Tigana carried the African-heritage flag in 1986.

“Christophe, you’re right. In 1998 we faced the French, and now ‌PY [Paraguay] will face a squad from Africa,” Chilavert mocked on social media.

But it is not only France who are now fielding more Black players, but almost every nation which wants to win trophies is doing so. Which raises the question: Is the future of global football Black? What will be the face of global football in another 40 years? African-heritage? Methinks so.

This is the first of two articles, examining the increasing presence of Black players in global football.

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