What Bangladesh can learn from Africa's World Cup rise

If you have watched the ongoing FIFA World Cup for more than 10 minutes, you will have noticed the pattern. Ten African nations qualified for the 2026 tournament—a record—and some of them did far more than making up the numbers: beating higher-ranked European sides, controlling matches, playing with a confidence that would have seemed fanciful a generation ago. Asia sent its own record contingent too, but most followed a familiar script: a spirited group-stage appearance, a respectable scoreline, then an early flight home. While nine of those 10 African sides advanced beyond the group stage, only two of Asia’s nine did. Two continents that once occupied the exact same level of world football have visibly drifted apart. The real question is not that they are now unequal but why. Africa’s success is a live case study for any football-hungry nation trying to figure out how to climb.

Africa and Asia entered World Cup history almost together: Egypt in 1934, the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) in 1938. But for three decades, both fought over a single inadequate allocation, often needing to beat a European side in a play-off even after winning their own zones. That changed only after all of Africa’s 15 entrants boycotted the 1966 World Cup in protest of being denied a guaranteed spot. FIFA relented, and in 1970, Africa got its own slot for the first time; Morocco walked through it. Asia’s path to dedicated representation opened more gradually. Both continents faced the same unfair barriers to entry, and what happened once those barriers were lifted is where their stories diverge.

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The real divide is structural, and it comes down to one word: diaspora. Decades of postcolonial migration sent millions of Africans to France, Belgium, Portugal, the Netherlands and England. Their children and grandchildren grew up inside the finest football academies on the planet. And FIFA’s generous eligibility rules—that a single grandparent’s nationality is enough—have allowed them to choose an ancestral flag as adults. Morocco’s current squad is reportedly three quarters made up of players born and trained outside the country. Senegal, Algeria, Tunisia, Nigeria and others have leaned on the same advantage. It is a historical accident that the African federations have turned into deliberate strategy.

Asia simply never had that accident. There was no comparable wave of Asian migration into Europe’s footballing heartlands, so there is no comparable pool of Europe-trained, Asia-eligible players waiting to be recruited. It also means most Asian federations have only one real and unglamorous option: build the game from the ground up—youth leagues, domestic competitions, coaching, sports science—over decades, not years. Only a handful of Asian nations have walked that road with any discipline, and it shows. Japan launched the professional J-League in 1993 and patiently built a footballing culture around it: academies, coaching philosophy, and a pathway to Europe. South Korea did the same with the K-League, then got a boost from co-hosting the 2002 World Cup, reaching the semi-final on genuine organisation, not luck. Both remain Asian football’s clear exceptions, regularly reaching the knockout rounds and occasionally troubling the traditional powers.

The lesson for the rest of Asia is uncomfortable: there is no shortcut. Gulf nations, flush with oil money, have too often imported ageing foreign stars into their domestic leagues rather than building youth pipelines. Elsewhere, football has to fight harder for attention, competing with baseball in Japan and Korea, cricket across South Asia, and state-funded Olympic sports in China for the same athletes and sponsorship money. Japan and Korea did not out-spend that competition; they out-lasted it, decade after decade, until the investment compounded.

Bangladesh’s football story is really about what got lost, not what was never built. Football was comfortably the country’s most popular sport throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. Then cricket happened: the country’s rise through the 90s, capped by qualification for the 1999 Cricket World Cup, redirected the nation’s sporting attention, sponsorship and institutional energy substantially towards the bat and ball. Football did not just stagnate—it was actively out-competed.

The consequence is a three-decade infrastructure deficit no single transfer window can fix. That is the context for the excitement around Hamza Choudhury’s Bangladesh debut in 2025, a Leicester City-trained, Premier League-tested midfielder who instantly became the most talented player in the squad, with the FIFA ranking moving up within weeks of his arrival. Shamit Shome, Fahmidul Islam and Tariq Kazi have since followed him in, and Bangladesh Football Federation says dozens more diaspora players, from a global Bangladeshi community estimated at around 87 lakh, have expressed interest.

It is tempting to read this as Bangladesh finding its own Moroccan shortcut. But it’s a small one—Bangladesh’s diaspora is nowhere near the scale of North and West Africa’s presence inside Europe’s elite academies. One or two Premier League-calibre players can move the ranking a few places and generate headlines; they cannot rebuild a football culture that lost three decades to a rival sport. That rebuilding—school leagues, academy structures, a domestic competition worth a teenager’s time—still has to happen the hard way, alongside a cricket culture. None of this is a case against cricket, which has earned its place fairly; it is simply the size of the gap football has to close.

Here is the part of the story Bangladesh should watch closely: several African federations have already recognised that the diaspora shortcut is not enough, and are moving to fix it. Morocco’s rise was never pure reliance on foreign-trained talent; the federation built the Mohammed VI Football Academy and a serious domestic programme alongside its diaspora outreach, treating the two as complementary, not substitutes. Senegal’s golden generation tells the same story from the other direction: Sadio Mané, Ismaila Sarr and Idrissa Gueye all began at homegrown academies before entering Europe—proof that a country can develop its own stars, not just recruit them back. Egypt’s football association is reportedly now studying Morocco’s blueprint, aiming to build a domestic pipeline. Africa’s smartest federations have concluded that diaspora talent buys you a ceiling you cannot build on unless you also invest at home. That is precisely the balance Bangladesh will need to strike, and it has the chance to do so at the very start of its journey, rather than decades in, the way Africa did.

The lions found their roar by combining a lucky inheritance with hard work at home. The tiger has no such inheritance waiting for it—only the hard work. That is a less romantic story, but it is the one that Japan and South Korea already proved works. Bangladesh’s task now is simply to start telling it—one academy, one school league, one diaspora signing at a time.

Hussain A Samad is consultant at the World Bank in Washington, DC and an independent researcher. He can be reached at hsamad2000@yahoo.com.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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