The 2023 AFCON tournament is proving to be the best ever by whatever yardsticks that are typically used to assess such competitions. The quality of play has been second to none and the embedded suspense in the games played so far would make screen writers of action films green with envy.
By Tiko Okoye
The 2023 AFCON is proving to be the best ever by whatever yardsticks that are typically used to assess such competitions. The quality of play has been second to none and the embedded suspense in the games played so far would make screen writers of action films green with envy.
Few days to the opening ceremonies of the 2023 AFCON in Ivory Coast, one of the world’s most famous digital predictors of the outcomes of sporting events, the Opta supercomputer, named Senegal (2021 winners) the overwhelming favourites to successfully defend the title they won in Cameroon, with a 12.8% probability.
Next to Senegal was the host nation of Ivory Coast, assigned a 12.1% chance of becoming the first home victors since Egypt in 2006. The Atlas Lions of Morocco are the supercomputer’s third favourites, with an 11.1% chance of glory. North African football powerhouses Algeria (9.7%) and Egypt (8.5%) rounded up the top five.
Senegal (2021 AFCON winners) is No.20 worldwide and No.2 in Africa, according to the current FIFA rankings. Ivory Coast (1992 and 2015 winners) is No.52 worldwide (down 5 places) and No.9 in Africa. Morocco (1976 winners) is No.13 worldwide and replaced Senegal as No.1 in Africa, due to the good run of results it experienced at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, where it became the first African and Arab nation to reach the semi-finals of a FIFA World Cup Tournament. Algeria (1990 and 2019 winners) is No.41 worldwide (down 11 places) and No.6 in Africa, while Tunisia (2004 winners) is No.32 worldwide (down 11 places) and No.3 in Africa.
Take another hard look at the predictions. None of the aforementioned traditional heavyweights of African football – with the exception of Ivory Coast – has made it to the quarter-finals! The case of Ivory Coast is even curiouser. The elephants started out with a flourish, seemingly proving bookmakers right by defeating a stubborn Guinea Bissau by 2 goals to nil.
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But just as Ivoirians were beginning to gloat and count their yet-to-hatch chicks, their team was decimated 4-0 before their very eyes! And to make matters worse, the ‘villain’ that inflicted the reality check on the team wasn’t even one of Africa’s traditional football titans but a relative minion, Equatorial Guinea, a tiny Central African country with less than two million inhabitants. This kind of scatterbrain humiliation has never before been witnessed in the history of AFCON. How are the presumptive mighty fallen!
The scenery that encapsulated the nation immediately after the national embarrassment was eerily similar to the situation in the “exceedingly great city” of Nineveh after Prophet Jonah delivered his divine message of total annihilation. Battered, humbled and penitent, a now sober Ivory Coast – just like the beleaguered inhabitants of Nineveh – descended on their knees begging Morocco to defeat Zambia so they could sneak through the back door into the round of 16 like a thief in the night by being among the four third-placed “best losers.” What a life!
And boy, how they’ve made the opportunity count by becoming the greatest comeback kids on the block. A team on the brink of extinction that needed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to come back to life took on the star-studded Teranga Lions of Senegal – starring global celebrities such as former Bayern Munich play-maker and Liverpool legend Sadio Mane, Salernitana’s (La Liga) Boulaye Dia, Chelsea’s Nicolas Jackson and former Chelsea great Edouard Mendy – and came out tops by way of a penalty shoot-out! How easily the conditions of life turn!
Just imagine the considerable horrors the leaders and people of Ivory Coast have been spared. It’d have amounted to a calamity of apocalyptic proportions to invest so much scarce financial resources in rehabilitating, upgrading and constructing stadiums, bridges, roads and other infrastructures only for the team to be kicked out at the preliminary group stage!
But it isn’t only the Ivoirians who are in Cloud 9. Several teams, including Nigeria’s Super Eagles, must be beginning to fancy their chances with the fearsome Senegal out of the picture. CAF officials would also be besides themselves with joy because spectators can be counted on to fill the stands as long as the host team remains in contention, thereby preserving the market value of its most valuable competition.
And now God has engraced the Elephants to be in a position to retake their destiny in their own hands. If they learned the appropriate lesson in humility and the imperative of teamwork, a team that practically snatched victory from the jaws of death will be very hard to beat, and the Super Eagles must be ready to leave everything out there on the field should both sides ever meet on the road to the final.
Quite ironically, the odds that Algeria’s Desert Foxes will top their group (57.5%, compared with Senegal’s 47.4%) was the highest assigned to any team in the tournament, probably because it loomed head and shoulders above the other teams in its Group D – Angola, Burkina Faso and Mauritania. But while Angola, Burkina Faso and Mauritania qualified for the round of 16 – the latter as one of the four ‘best losers’ – Algeria and Tunisia, along with Ghana, didn’t even make it past the group stage!
In sharp contrast, most of the teams that were given a token chance of proceeding beyond the group stage by both the Opta supercomputer and regular bookmakers surprised everyone. The West African island nation of Cape Verde (0.9%), with a population less than 600,000, booked a spot in the last-8 after beating Mauritania.
The same thing goes for Nigeria’s opponent in Friday’s first quarter-final game – the Black Panthers of Angola (0.5% chance), South Africa (2.1% chance) and Democratic Republic of Congo (2.4% chance). All these teams have made it to the quarter-finals, with Nigeria (8.0% chance), in sixth position, being the only one among them with hopes rated above 5%.
And now that both Senegal and Morocco have been sent home, Opta’s supercomputer has renamed the Super Eagles as the odds-on favourites to lift the cup. After seeing their chances adversely affected by the drab opening match draw against Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria’s improved, as evidenced by victories over Ivory Coast and Cameroon, as well as the exit of other tournament favourites such as Algeria, Egypt, Morocco (touted to be the toughest team on the side of Nigeria’s bracket) and Senegal is said to be leaving the Super Eagles as the overwhelming choice for the trophy.
According to Opta, Nigeria now has a 29.5% chance of becoming winners of the 2023 AFCON, nearly double the next favoured team, Ivory Coast, with a 15.4% chance of claiming the title as hosts. But rather than being a huge morale booster and providing me with any comfort, the revised Opta prediction is giving me the jitters for two principal reasons.
First, from match results so far, any prediction by the electronic football super sleuth is akin to a kiss of death! As a matter of fact, only hours to the release of the foregoing predictions, Opta’s supercomputer released a set of conditions backing Nigeria’s Super Eagles to lift the trophy with a whopping 25.2% chance. Next on the list was Morocco’s Atlas Lions, with a 17.2% probability, and third was the resurgent Elephants of Ivory Coast, with a 15.8% chance.
But if you take cognizance of the fact that South Africa’s Bafana-Bafana sent Morocco packing last night with a shocking 2-0 scoreline then you’ll know that the supercomputer is just as precise and dependable as a raging bull in a china shop.
My second reason for feeling uneasy with the recent predictions is that while facing either South Africa or Cape Verde in the semifinal might pose the easier-looking route to the final – if the Super Eagles successfully navigate the tricky quarter-final encounter with Angola – the Super Eagles might be tempted to take victory for granted and such overconfidence might see the team slipping on potential banana peels that could easily derail their ambition for a fourth AFCON title!
It bears repeating that there are no longer any minions in African football. It’s no longer the size of the dog in the fight that counts, but, as famous American writer and humorist Mark Twain’s averred, it’s now the size of the fight in the dog that matters. A level playing field is beginning to be established as an increasing number of African countries are successfully wooing talents, particularly playing in European professional football leagues and who have represented their countries of domicile in age-grade competitions but are still eligible to play in their ancestral homes’ senior men’s teams, to do so.
But if care isn’t taken, such a trend could culminate in the neglect of the domestic leagues with dire consequences for youth development. That’s why it is imperative for football operations to be professionally managed as going-concern businesses based on international best practices. If well executed, this approach would rival the exports of mineral resources as the highest earners of foreign exchange. National governments must create a conducive environment to promote investments in football in particular and sports in general.