Beyond Limits: African teams lead new order at 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup

Debutants, Morocco, will meet former colonial masters, France, in the round of 16 at the ongoing FIFA Women’s World Cup

Some pundits have christened the ongoing FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand as the ‘Age of the underdogs.’ They point at Jamaica, Philippines, Nigeria, South Africa, and Morocco as teams that have shown in the last two weeks that paper rankings don’t matter once the ball bounces on the field.

In every international championship, particularly football, certain teams are seen as favourites to get to, at least, the semifinals of the competition. It has been that way since FIFA created a World Cup for women, with Germany, Brazil, the United States, China, South Korea, Norway, Sweden, Australia, and Canada almost always at the dying ends of every edition.

African countries and some of the minnows of North and Central America, as well as Asia, are usually not reckoned with because they have proven, over time, that they are mostly in the competition to make up the numbers. Since Nigeria got to the quarterfinals in the USA 1999 edition, no member of the ‘less developed nations in football’ have gone past the second stage of the championship. But that is about to change.

In the just-concluded group matches, these lowly-rated nations showed that they are the emerging forces in women’s football by the manner they dispatched some of their more illustrious counterparts, with Germany’s failure to progress in a group that put forward Colombia and Morocco the biggest shock of them all.

Apart from Morocco, Africa also has Nigeria and South Africa in the round of 16, with at least one likely to qualify for the quarterfinals.

The 2023 FIFA World Cup, which is the first that will see three African nations