The World Cup: Does Africa need foreign coaches?

By D. A. Jawo, Banjul, The Gambia

If there is any big lesson that Africa must have no doubt learnt in the on-going World Cup, it is the undeniable fact that engaging foreign coaches is a sheer waste of money as it brought no benefits for any of the participating African teams.

There is absolutely no doubt that local coaches would have performed much better than the disaster we have seen in South Africa. A good case in point is Nigeria’s Shaibu Amodu, who, against all odds, succeeded in qualifying the Super Eagles to the World Cup and the African Nations’ Cup, but only to be denied the opportunity to go to South Africa. The Nigerian FA decided at the very last minute to engage a foreign coach, no doubt pay him several times more than they would have paid Amodu, and I can bet anything that under Amodu, the Super Eagles would have performed much better than under the foreign coach.

It is a similar situation with all the other participating African countries, with the exception of Algeria, which was the only one that had a local coach, and yet performed much more impressively than some of the rest.

It certainly does not make much sense for Africa to spend so much of its meagre resources on foreign coaches when there are several local talents available who can do even much better and with far less expense. Imagine, some of these foreign coaches cannot even speak or understand the language that a majority of the footballers they are supposed to be coaching speak. How can anyone therefore, expect them to impart their training skills effectively on the footballers when they could hardly communicate with them?

It is also an undeniable fact that in order to effectively coach and guide someone, one must first understand the social norms and values of his society, and that is certainly not the case with the foreign coaches, most of whom originate from countries with completely different social and cultural environments.

While all the participating African teams, with the exception of Algeria, had foreign coaches, yet, apart from Ghana, they all failed to make it to the second round. Even in the case of Ghana, it was by sheer luck that they passed the preliminary stage because they could not score goals, and they only depended on penalties to achieve what they had achieved.

Therefore, it remains to be seen later today, with such type of football, how Ghana can advance any further than the second round.

While the World Cup is a global event, at least being held on African soil for the first time, everyone expected African teams to perform to expectations. However, what we have seen is like a retrogression of their past performances; a betrayal of our highest expectations!

Therefore, we can all hope and pray that African FAs would hence accept that the hiring of foreign coaches is not the answer to Africa’s soccer inferiority, and that local coaches are always more effective than their more expensive foreign counterparts.