Abstract
The Fédération International de Football Association (FIFA), World Cup competition, is a quadrennial festival of world’s biggest international football tournament, with the sport, entertainment, benefits, costs, and rules. Since Egypt played the World Cup held in Italy in 1934 as the first African team (ACL Sports, December 25, 2017), no African team has won the age-long coveted trophy, even though participation is open to countries which qualified among slots apportioned to regions of the world. African participation in the 2018 World Cup tournament in Russia was a huge contradiction derogatorily referred to as ‘Africa United’; The victory of French ‘Africa United’ team in the tournament raised fiery debate. Whereas the French team with 80% African immigrants won the trophy, five African representative teams – Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia were all eliminated in the 32-team group stage of the competition despite that Africa represents the second largest continent of World Cup fans, behind Asia. Despite the huge social, political and economic prospects of the tournament to national and global development, studies have been very slim. With the broad objective of examining the role of African immigrants in the French team, we underscored the specific objective of underscoring Africa global partnership in development. Using the power-based model of formal and informal institutions and their effects on development outcomes (Gandy, 1992, Helmke and Levitsky, 2004; Keefer, 2005), we concluded that Africa’s poor achievement in the tournament worsened its periphery station in the FIFA World Cup and global political economy and recommended policy steps for improvement
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