AFCON 2025: Why are east African teams so far behind other nations?

The Athletic has live coverage of Nigeria vs. Tunisia from the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations.

Of the four Africa Cup of Nations games being played on Saturday, December 27, Uganda versus Tanzania is easy to overlook.

Nigeria face Tunisia in a meeting of two former AFCON winners and DR Congo against Senegal is another matchup of continental heavyweights.

But Uganda and Tanzania are playing one another for only the sixth time and it will be the first time since 2019 (Kenya 3-2 Tanzania in Cairo, Egypt) that an all-east African game takes place at AFCON.

Even more significantly, those two countries will host the 2027 edition of the tournament with neighbours Kenya, meaning it will be held in east Africa for the first time since it was staged in Ethiopia in 1976. Kenya were due to host AFCON in 1996 but were stripped of it.

An east African country has won AFCON only twice: Ethiopia in 1962 (a four-team tournament) and Sudan eight years later (eight teams), both on home soil. The last finalists? Uganda in 1978.

So as Tanzania and Uganda face off in Rabat, with Kenya and Ethiopia watching from home, why are east African nations lagging behind when it comes to football?

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The recent sporting history of east Africa is typically oversimplified to a nation that is unmatched in its development of middle- and long-distance runners, winning a majority of medals at the Olympics and World Championships, and dominating the major marathon podiums.

Much like how Jamaica (in sprinting) and New Zealand (rugby union) are superpowers in specific sports, outperforming those with bigger populations and GDP, east African nations tend to be overlooked for anything that is not running.

“Obviously there’s huge pride in athletics, but football is the main sport,” says Alasdair Howorth, a Kenyan-born Scotsman who works as a journalist covering African football. “In parts of Kenya and Uganda, as well, rugby is very big. It’s very specific to certain areas.”

If we include Ethiopia with the three host countries for AFCON 2027, Howorth says “all four are crazy, football-mad countries”.

He continues: “In the 1960s and 1970s there was a huge footballing culture in east Africa. You hear these stories of these crowds of 70,000-plus fans in Kampala and Nairobi. The countries have a really established football history and heritage.”

The CECAFA Cup, a tournament for countries in central and east Africa, predates AFCON, having started in 1926 (then called the Gossage Cup) as a yearly match between Kenya and Uganda. It started to expand in the 1940s and, at its peak in the 2010s, was a 12-team tournament.

Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda are all former British colonies, gaining independence in the 1960s (Eritrea got their independence from Ethiopia late in 1993, both having once been controlled by Italy), which explains the roots of football culture in those countries.

Could, and will, east Africa ever be a footballing corner of the world? “I think it’s too soon. As a region, we’re still behind west Africa,” says Maxwell Muttai, a biomechanist and PhD researcher with On Running and Loughborough University. “In the next 50 years? Maybe.”

Muttai points out it rains a lot in Kenya, putting a strain on pitches for young players, although he notes there are a growing number of all-weather surfaces.

“Many children may try to play football at the beginning but may not go so much into it,” he adds. “Also, the parents don’t have the confidence to allow their children to explore their talent on that scale because they are not convinced or do not know that career path.”

Genetics may be at play, too. An overwhelming majority of Kenyan and Ugandan distance runners are Kalenjin and come from the Rift Valley, a mountainous region in east Africa. Muttai points out that many footballers in Kenya come from close to Lake Victoria.

That is Africa’s largest lake and has typically been home to the Luo and Luhya peoples. AFC Leopards and Gor Mahia, the two most successful clubs in the country, come from there too. In Muttai’s words, these athletes “resemble the body type of west Africans” more than the distance runners of the Rift Valley.

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Howorth calls Kenya “the great underachievers of African football”.

He feels, to some extent, an obsession with the English Premier League in the country comes at a cost to domestic football, though he acknowledges a lack of investment and other hurdles to growth too. Kenya was also banned from global football for nine months in 2022 over alleged misappropriation of funds.

“But they’re now back on track, a new federation,” he says. “Benni McCarthy (former Manchester United and South Africa striker) is the new head coach.”

He considers Uganda the standout east African side at the moment, although they lost their opening 2025 AFCON game 3-1 to Tunisia. “I think the difference is they’ve developed a few good academies, have a better organised league, and have a really good pipeline of moving players abroad. They’ve also tapped into their diaspora a little bit better than Kenya.”

Howorth believes Uganda’s head coach, Paul Put, is a key part of their success. He joined in November 2023, following a lengthy coaching career in Belgium’s leagues and various international jobs, including managing Guinea, Congo, The Gambia and Jordan, and leading Burkina Faso to the AFCON final (which they lost) in 2013.

Howorth notes that “every few years” a Ugandan team qualifies for Africa’s Champions League, most recently Vipers in 2022-23 — they drew two and lost four of their six group-stage games and came bottom.

Tanzania’s Young Africans (colloquially known as Yanga) and Simba have led the way among east African sides, repeatedly qualifying for the group stage of a competition that no CECAFA team has ever won. Yanga were quarter-finalists in 2023-24, beaten on penalties at the end of two legs by South Africa’s Mamelodi Sundowns.

“In the 1960s, Kenya and Uganda went kind of down a very neoliberal, capitalistic, and a western-facing direction, whereas Tanzania went very nationalist, very socialist, and that translates into their football,” Howorth explains. “So Tanzania has one of, if not the most interesting, football leagues in Africa.

“Yanga and Simba, two teams in Dar es Salaam (the capital of Tanzania), are your Barcelona-Real Madrid; big rivals in the same part of town. They are socio-style clubs, 50+1 (majority fan owned). It’s a huge game, and they are both really rich.”

Prosper Bartalomewa coach and performance analyst across the youth and senior teams at Yanga, concurs. “Locally it is a difficult league, still a growing league both in competition and in terms of quality.

“Young players are scouted early on and most of the national team players are being exposed to continental football through clubs.” The benefit, he feels, is “familiarisation” of elite-level, knockout football.

Howorth explains it is the only African league where every match is broadcast worldwide.

“I think we might be the next big thing on the continent,” adds Bartalomew. “Also, Tanzania have opened the door for foreigners, now the league is allowed 12 foreign players, which help to impose Tanzanian players to a more challenging environment.”

When Tanzania qualified for AFCON in 2019, it ended a wait of nearly 40 years. They missed out two years later but made it to Cameroon in 2023, holding DR Congo and Zambia to draws despite finishing bottom of their group, and suffered a 2-1 defeat by Nigeria in their opening game of the 2025 tournament.

Footballing identity is something Tanzania have played around with in recent years. “If you look at the Tanzanian AFCON squad for 2023, there’s four lower league players (in England),” says Howorth. “Now, they’ve kind of pushed back against that, because there is a real strong sense of nationalism in Tanzania, that their football represents the strength of the league and the league is relatively very strong.”

Ethiopia are similar. The vast majority of clubs are state-owned (Sidama Coffee are the current league leaders) and players are paid relatively well.

“But it means that’s incredibly insular. Very few Ethiopians actually go abroad to play football,” Howorth says.

They have not had a club team in the Champions League since Saint George in 2017, and have only made it to AFCON twice since the 1990s — going out in the groups in 2013 and 2021.

Inevitably, talk about success tends to focus on role models and their importance. “(Mbwana) Samatta is an icon for football here (in Tanzania), he has inspired a lot of players, especially after his move to Aston Villa,” says Bartalomew.

Muttai agrees, citing Victor Wanyama of Tottenham Hotspur and his older brother, McDonald Mariga, who played for various clubs across Europe, and was notably part of Jose Mourinho’s 2010 Champions League-winning Inter team.

In another way, the record-breaking transfers of Naomi Girma to Chelsea and Alexander Isak to Liverpool matter a lot for east Africa.

Girma was born in California to Ethiopian parents, and Isak, a Sweden international from Stockholm, has Eritrean heritage. They will not play international football for their east African countries but that representation, to many, matters a lot.

Howorth, though, is less convinced. “I think we sometimes overplay that a bit,” he says of role models. “In some ways Wanyama slightly opened the door (but) Kenyans are just so obsessed with the Premier League and Champions League.”

One overlooked sign of long-term progress, for Howorth, is that European teams are starting to recruit in the region. “Some clubs that have kind of woken up to east Africa. The best example is AC Horsens in Denmark, they have an entire scouting department based solely around African players.

“It’s headquartered in Nairobi, all based around bringing in players from smaller countries, with that Danish-American model of buying young players, getting them into the team and then selling after they’ve done really well.”

Expectations are being kept realistic for 2027. Gabon in 2017 were the last host nation not to make it out of the group and, with the next edition being the first time that three countries have shared hosting, there is a possibility of none qualifying for the knockouts.

There have been green shoots. Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania co-hosted the African Nations Championships last summer, a continental tournament like AFCON but specifically for national players in their home leagues. All three won their groups, though were eliminated in the first knockout round.

Howorth is optimistic. “I do think if Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda host a good AFCON, that could change things. I think that could actually demonstrate that there are pathways.”