from Africa Today Volume 50, Number 1

Excerpt from

Africa, the FIFA Presidency, and the Governance of World Football: 1974, 1998, and 2002

Paul Darby

Since the independence movements of the late 1950s and 1960s, most African nations have remained firmly rooted at the base of the world economic and political order; however, in global sports, Africa has made its presence felt, and it is perhaps in international football that the continent's sports stars have made their biggest impact. The World Cup, the Olympic football tournament, and FIFA's underage competitions have been enriched by the presence of African nations.¹ African performances at these competitions show that Africa's most vibrant football nations have emerged as credible challengers to the traditional preeminence of South America and Europe. These performances on the field of play have been matched by the advance and improving profile of Africa within the governance of the world game. Nowhere has this profile been more manifest than in the central role that Africa has played in determining who holds the most powerful position in world football, the FIFA presidency. This article adopts a qualitative methodology involving in-depth interviews, primary archival material, and secondary sources to assess Africa's status as the key electoral constituency in the struggles for the FIFA presidency in 1974, 1998, and 2002. The analyses here examine the ways in which those seeking the FIFA presidency have sought to present themselves as advocates of African football and explore the implications that this attitude has had for the development of the game in Africa.

Contextualizing Africa's Role in FIFA's Power Struggles

In order to properly contextualize Africa's role in the elections for the FIFA Presidency in 1974, 1998, and 2002 it is necessary to briefly say something about Africa's position within FIFA during the colonial era and its immediate aftermath. For its first fifty years, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) was dominated by northern European and South American administrators. The globalization of the game in the second half of the 20th century presented the association's established order with a potential threat. FIFA's European nations responded by jealously working toward the preservation of their interests. As a consequence, Africa was regarded largely as an irrelevance, and until the late 1950s FIFA refused to countenance that continent's lobby for a democratization of the game's institutional and competition structures. For example, in the first half of the 1950s, the world body's European constituents routinely frustrated attempts to procure a place on FIFA's executive committee and organize a continental confederation for the African game (Darby 2002a; FIFA 1953, 1954).

The formation of the Confédération Africaine de Football (CAF) in 1957 and the emergence of a politically vociferous African constituency within FIFA--a constituency that numbered more than thirty nations by the mid-1960s--represented a firm foundation in which to root their struggle against the world body's European bias. With representation on FIFA's governing board following the one-nation-one-vote principle, it might have been expected that African aspirations for fulfilment in the world game were realizable; however, the world body's European hierarchy refused to sanction any significant democratization of the world game. Africa's calls for a more equitable distribution of World Cup places was met with stiff opposition from FIFA's established European constituencies (Darby 2002b). The Eurocentric approach of the Englishman Sir Stanley Rous, then FIFA President, did little to appease within FIFA the growing resentment at a set of power relations that effectively marginalized African football. CAF officials, most notably Ydnekatchew Tessema, the confederation's president at the time, increasingly gave voice to their frustrations and resentment, and this led to a lobby aimed at ending Europe's administrative domination over world football. Rhamadan Ali, a noted Tanzanian sports journalist and former international footballer, recalls the feelings of the African confederation toward the FIFA president at that time: "The AFC (CAF) was fed up with Sir Stanley Rous' FIFA and wanted a new man at the top who was more receptive to the interests of African football" (Ali 1984:10). Africa's difficulty though was that, acting alone, CAF could not have hoped to challenge Rous for the presidency of FIFA. The emergence and ascendancy of FIFA's only non-European president was firmly implanted in this complex set of circumstances.

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