WASHINGTON—I recently asked Real Madrid’s Antonio Rüdiger what he wanted to be remembered for after he stops playing football.
“I want to leave a legacy,” he told me, explaining how his foundation’s support for education, health, and sports development in Sierra Leone had made many children’s dreams come true. “Legacy for me is doing something, not being a legend of football,” the former German footballer, whose mother is from Sierra Leone, said during an interview for the Atlantic Council Africa Center’s Beyond the Game series.
Rüdiger’s pursuit of a legacy that will impact the next generation sits at the heart of one of the biggest questions about the future of sports in Africa. Who is investing in the next generation of sporting talent? How early are African countries making that investment? And how much is the continent willing to invest before the medals and trophies are won? Africa has never lacked extraordinary athletic talent. What it has lacked are the institutions that consistently nurture talent from childhood to elite competition. Building those institutions will require policy frameworks that bring together governments, businesses, schools, sports federations, athletes, and communities around a shared vision.
As someone who has worked in sports policy, I have seen firsthand how the presence and absence of government policy, private investment, and cross-sector collaboration can shape sporting outcomes.
In 2012, I was appointed Special Assistant on Youth and Grassroots Sports to the then Nigerian Minister of Sports Bolaji Abdullahi. We arrived at the sports ministry barely two months before the London 2012 Olympics. We went to London as part of the government contingent accompanying Nigeria’s Olympic athletes and returned from the Games without a single medal. In our postmortem analysis, we concluded that the challenges we encountered were not just technical or performance-oriented, but structural. We had developed a culture of rushing to prepare for tournaments while spending too little on developing the pipeline that produces consistent success.
Abdullahi drew three major conclusions from Nigeria’s performance that year. First, Olympic medals almost always reflect sustained financial investment. The correlation between the medals table and the level of economic development of the best-performing countries is no coincidence. Second, medals aren’t won overnight. Every medal is the result of years of planning, investment, and technical preparation. Medals are won by building systems capable of producing medalists, not by simply selecting athletes and hoping they can win. Third, and perhaps most important, the Olympics are a lifetime commitment. “The champion is in the child.” That phrase would become one of the guiding principles of how we approached our work.
In the months that followed, the ministry launched Rhythm N’ Play, a national campaign to mobilize an additional two million schoolchildren into sports by establishing school clubs that combined athletics with music, entertainment, and popular culture. It took buy-in beyond just the government. The initiative was driven through the Nigeria Academicals Sports Committee (NASCOM)—a multi-stakeholder body under the Ministry of Sports that brought together school sports federations and private sector partners. Nigerian businessman and sports philanthropist Yemi Idowu chaired the board, reflecting the government’s vision of integrating the private sector into grassroots sports development. As Board Secretary of NASCOM, I coordinated several aspects of the campaign.
Rhythm N’ Play was soon followed in December 2013 by Nigeria’s first-ever annual National Youth Games, which we designed as a pathway for athletes aged fifteen years and below to transition from grassroots competitions to elite national representation. To this day, the Games continue to serve as a platform for talent development.
As we envisioned it, the more children participate in school sports, the greater the chances of identifying exceptional talent early. Countries that regularly produce elite talent understand this principle well. Nigeria’s own experience at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics exemplifies why this policy direction matters. The country’s only two medalists at the tournament, Blessing Oborodudu and Ese Brume, both began their pathway to elite competition through school sports. This is why Rüdiger’s thinking about legacy conveys lessons beyond football.
Philanthropy can open doors, but systems make success replicable
The Antonio Rüdiger Foundation has donated more than $100,000 in sports equipment for young people in Sierra Leone, helping schools and communities create opportunities that many children would otherwise never have. But more significant than the investment itself is what it represents—a bet on the future.
Rüdiger is hardly alone. A number of professional athletes have turned to sports philanthropy in Africa as part of their legacies. Ivorian soccer icon Didier Drogba’s foundation, for example, has backed multimillion-dollar initiatives to fund grassroots sports on the continent.
The lesson here is not that every athlete should become a philanthropist who invests in grassroots sports development. Rather, it is that Africa needs an ecosystem where governments, businesses, foundations, schools, communities, sports federations, and successful athletes all play complementary roles.
Already, global sports initiatives such as FIFA’s Global Citizen Education Fund and the International Olympic Committee’s Olympic Values Education Programme (OVEP) demonstrate what is possible when sports become a vehicle for talent development and youth education at the grassroots. OVEP is recording progress in Senegal, where it is being used to engage young people through Olympic values ahead of this year’s Youth Olympic Games in Dakar.
Many African countries continue to produce extraordinary athletes despite limited investment. If anything, this is an indication that the continent possesses enormous natural and raw talent. But relying on exceptional individuals rather than building sustainable systems makes sporting success unpredictable. For example, despite its fifty-four FIFA member associations and national teams with exceptional individual talent, Africa has yet to produce a World Cup champion. Beyond football, the lesson is similar: Countries that want consistent elite performance need systems that identify and develop talent early.
Morocco’s transformation in football offers an inspiring example. When the country made history in 2022 by becoming the first African nation to reach the semifinals of a FIFA World Cup, it came as a surprise to many. But for those who had followed Morocco’s investment in football, the result had been years in the making.
Morocco’s ambassador to the United States, Youssef Amrani, hinted at this point while speaking at an Atlantic Council Sports Diplomacy event ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. He explained that the country’s success was the product of a twenty-year strategy launched under King Mohammed VI. Central to that strategy was investing in football academies that combined education with elite talent development.
As Amrani put it: “We created football academies that mixed education and football. And thanks to these academies, we have these results today.”
How Africa can build lasting sports systems
For many African countries, investing in youth sports is seen as a luxury. But sports should be part of a national development strategy. A vibrant sports system improves public health, keeps children engaged in school, creates employment, strengthens communities, and builds industries around coaching, media, apparel, tourism, events, and technology. Countries that invest in sports are investing in human capital.
Africa’s population is projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050. With 28 percent of the world’s people under the age of twenty-five living in Africa, the continent’s opportunities in sports and other creative endeavors are enormous. But Africa’s full potential in sports will not be realized without governments focusing on three areas:
First, build enduring grassroots sports systems that outlive political administrations. That will require institutionalizing and continuously investing in school sports initiatives and programs that make grassroots sports a visible and valued aspect of national life. When newly elected leaders reverse or abandon the policy initiatives of their predecessors, development stagnates, investor confidence in the sector weakens, and trust in policy institutions erodes.
Second, treat sports as a national development priority, beginning with youth sports. Governments should see sports as a cross-sectoral imperative, recognizing how it contributes to public health, tourism, commerce, youth employment, and the creative economy. Elevating sports in this manner would also strengthen public interest and create the confidence needed to attract greater private sector investment. Governments should reinforce that confidence through tax incentives for corporate sponsors of grassroots sports, transparent governance, and accountability frameworks that encourage businesses, philanthropists, and successful athletes to invest in the next generation.
Third, develop and invest in collegiate sports as a pathway to elite competition and economic opportunities for young people. One of the missing links in many African countries is the absence of a robust collegiate sports system. While inter-university competitions exist in some countries, they are rarely supported by robust systems capable of steadily developing athletes while allowing them to continue their education. The United States shows what is possible. At the Paris 2024 Olympics, 75 percent of Team USA had played in collegiate sports while 84 percent of its medalists had collegiate sports backgrounds. This illustrates the important role universities can play as a bridge between school sports and elite competitions.
In countries where talented young athletes may face economic pressure to support themselves and their families, the opportunity to combine education and sports with an income could incentivize more African youth to remain in sports long enough to develop their talent. In the United States, name, image and likeness (NIL) allows college athletes to earn income from sponsorships, endorsements, appearances, and other commercial opportunities while continuing their education. Darian Mensah, an American college football quarterback of Ghanaian descent, for example, is valued at $6.5 million in NIL opportunities in 2026. This is not an argument for Africa to simply import the American template. But policymakers in Africa can draw inspiration and aspire to build the sporting ecosystems that make opportunities like NIL possible for young African athletes. Imagine the multiplier effects if sports became part of Africa’s growing digital creator economy, creating opportunities across media, streaming, advertising, merchandising, and the broader creative economy.
