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Hosts Ivory Coast will cap a remarkable comeback if they can overcome Nigeria in Sunday’s final of the African football championship, having survived multiple scares on a madcap four-week journey that has left home fans dreaming of an improbable victory.
Locals have taken to calling their team “les Revenants”, or the Zombies, for their ability come back from the dead during a nail-biting run to the African Cup of Nations showpiece match when all seemed lost. The performances have also provided an unusual case study in management, after the Ivorian authorities sacked their manager mid-tournament and replaced him with someone who had never taken charge of a senior game in his career.
The team’s progress is in keeping with the high drama that has characterised the tournament that pits 24 African nations against one another. Favourites such as Morocco and Senegal were eliminated early, while smaller nations such as Equatorial Guinea and Cape Verde have shown their skills. Cape Verde’s lack of available talent saw them turn to LinkedIn for recruitment, unearthing players such as the Irish-born defender Roberto Lopes.
The Afcon tournament, which cost Ivory Coast an estimated $1bn to organise, has been a celebration of African football at its most dynamic, with a new record for goals scored in the competition’s history.
The prize money of $7mn for the winner is also the highest in the competition’s history as Patrice Motsepe, the South African mining billionaire who is president of the Confederation of African Football, seeks to transform the competition and the profile of the game on the continent.
Solace Chukwu, a sports analyst at media group Pulse Sports, said that although attendances had not always been as high as organisers would have hoped, Ivory Coast’s performances had kept local interest alive.
The success of the host team, known as The Elephants, “seems to have deepened the investment of their fan base,” Chukwu said, referring to the passionate orange-clad Ivorian supporters who have celebrated in the stadiums and on the streets of the economic capital Abidjan and other cities. “Now there is a sense of inevitability to them winning the title: having survived so much, how can they not go on to glory?”
All seemed lost for Ivory Coast after a shock 4-0 defeat to minnows Equatorial Guinea in their final group game, before an unlikely series of results in other games saw them snatch a place in the knockout stages as the last of the four third-place teams.
They then defeated defending champions Senegal on penalties after an 86th-minute equaliser had forced extra time. Against Mali in the quarter-finals, another late equaliser, this time in the 90th minute, took the game to extra time before Oumar Diakité’s audacious flick won it with virtually the last kick of the game as penalties loomed.
Their 1-0 win over unfancied Democratic Republic of Congo in the semi-finals was straightforward by the standards set over recent weeks. But Sébastien Haller’s winner marked an emotional moment for a player who only returned to football last year after a cancer diagnosis threatened to derail his career.
If Ivory Coast’s path to the final against a strong Nigeria side bears the hallmarks of a team refusing to know when they are beaten, it becomes even more remarkable that they are doing it without the manager they started the tournament with.
Frenchman Jean-Louis Gasset was fired after the Equatorial Guinea defeat, before an unusual attempt to secure a loan of Hervé Renard, the French manager who led them to continental triumph in 2015, was rebuffed. Only then did they turn to Emerse Faé, an Ivorian ex-international who is now making his first steps in management.
Although Afcon 2024 can be marked down as a sporting victory, a report by data analysis firm GlobalData showed there was still work to be done for African football to secure a bigger share of the financial rewards enjoyed in Europe.
It noted successes in securing commercial and sponsorship deals, including title sponsor TotalEnergies of France, but also that the competing nations’ collective “commercial value is still fairly limited in both value and volume when compared to other leagues around the world”.
Yet Olivia Snooks, sports analyst at GlobalData, also pointed to “progress and growth in Afcon team sponsorship compared to previous years, which is promising”.
Standing in Ivory Coast’s way is Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, whose progress to the final has been built on a sturdy defence and some energetic performances from star striker Victor Osimhen.
The Super Eagles, who are looking to win their fourth title and their first since 2013, have already defeated Ivory Coast in this competition and will hope for a repeat on Sunday.
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