OPINION | Why Africa won't ever win the World Cup

Forty-five years after Pelé's 1977 prediction that an African team would win the Football World Cup before 2000, the latest World Cup and recent continental and international tournaments show why his prediction looks increasingly wrong and suggest that an African team is unlikely ever to win the event.  

African teams have done much better than in 2018 with Senegal and Morocco progressing to the knockout stages this year. While Senegal lost to England, Morocco pulled off a famous victory over Spain and will meet Portugal in the quarter-finals. 

This success, however, conceals the failure of African football in Africa. 

One explanation for the failure of African teams favoured a generation ago was that leading African or Caribbean talents were poached by European countries with money. 

For example, in 1998, the World Cup-winning French team had players Patrick Vieira, Marcel Desailly and Lilian Thuram, who were born outside France. The situation now is dramatically different. 

When Morocco upset Spain, only one player in the Belgian lineup (Amadou Onana) was born in Africa. In the Moroccan team, however, only three of their starting lineup were born in Morocco. The bulk of their team were born, raised and had their football education outside the country, largely in Holland and France.

Was this really a victory for African football? 

Morocco celebrate (Getty Images)

An even more dramatic example was the Senegal team, whose starting lineup contained no fewer than seven French-born players and one German-born player. The Tunisian team that beat current world champions France in a group match had six players in the starting lineup born in France. 

In the 2019 African Cup of Nations final between Algeria and Senegal, half of the 46