There’s something about a summer soccer tournament that feels like a love affair.
The 2026 Women’s Africa Cup of Nations was not perfect. It is still far too difficult to access the tournament outside Africa, and the overall quality and depth of its broadcast and commentary pale in comparison to those of its counterparts in Europe, North America and South America.
But there was still plenty to tug at the heartstrings at this WAFCON, beginning (or, rather, ending) with the final — a meeting between the lowest-ranked team in the tournament and one that didn’t even technically qualify. That seldom happens in modern football, where moments of wonder feel endangered by domineering datasets, bloated schedules, and injuries.
Cameroon scratched their names into history books on Sunday as just the fourth team to win WAFCON with their emphatic 3-0 victory over tournament debutants Malawi. Both teams, along with Morocco and Algeria, have earned automatic qualification to the 2027 Women’s World Cup by reaching the WAFCON semifinals.
This year’s WAFCON was heady with drama as unsuspecting protagonists humbled giants, fighting not only for Africa’s biggest prize but also for a ticket to Brazil. Along the way, as is often the case in an international tournament, stars were born. Cameroon’s Marie Ngah Manga, Malawi’s Faith Chinzimu, Morocco’s Sakina Ouzraoui and Algeria’s Inès Khiri will soon shine on an even bigger stage.
African footballers are well aware of the platform big tournaments like WAFCON provide: A standout performance can lead to recruitment to play professionally at bigger clubs abroad and support their families.
Temwa and Tabitha Chaŵinga of Malawi and Aïssata Traore of Mali embrace the responsibility of uplifting their younger national teammates toward the opportunities they’ve had. The desire to discover the “next Temwa” is understandable, even irresistible, but too often that mindset flattens a club’s perception of an African player to their detriment. And what about standout players from teams that didn’t qualify for the World Cup but left their mark nonetheless, such as 18-year-old N’Sira Safi Ouédraogo (Nordsjælland) and 24-year-old Inès Konan (Strasbourg) of Ivory Coast?
This tournament proves there is no shortage of talent in Africa and that it’s not just concentrated in traditional footballing nations such as Nigeria, South Africa, and Morocco. The places these young, budding African stars take their careers next could say a lot about where the future of women’s football lies.
In this week’s “Three Words,” a weekly column that takes key players, teams and moments in global women’s soccer and boils them down to three words, we get into why clubs looking to sign the stars of WAFCON must be prepared to handle them with the utmost care to ensure their sustainability.
Handle with care
As with most things involving Africa, there is a grave disparity between the breadth of talent and the scope of opportunity that limits the clubs available to African players who aren’t already playing in European leagues.
The Football Association (FA) in England is among the starkest examples of this. The federation admits international players to its leagues based on a government endorsement body (GBE) point system that takes into account the FIFA world ranking of the player’s national team, and the number of minutes a player has registered with their national team and in other top club competitions.
This scoring rubric is skewed, often devaluing African and Asian competitions while elevating European, North American and South American ones. Nigeria (36th) is the only African national team in the top 40 of FIFA’s world ranking.
That category is essentially the cutoff for easily earning the required number of points (24) for visa eligibility — and even then, the Women’s Super League was represented by only two players at WAFCON (both from Nigeria: Chiamaka Nnadozie of Brighton & Hove Albion and defender Rofiat Imuran of the London City Lionesses). Operators within women’s football in England have criticized the GBE system for this high threshold, arguing it discourages clubs from signing the exact kind of under-the-radar talent that inevitably emerges every WAFCON.
Compare this to France, which has found ways to continue benefiting from its colonial history across Africa and the Caribbean, even in football.
The Cotonou Agreement allows French leagues to recruit African players from former colonies without sacrificing international roster spots, paving the way for more open recruitment channels. This explains why a large subset of WAFCON players from francophone countries such as Algeria (ranked 74th in the world), Senegal (79th), and Mali (84th) play for French clubs. There’s also a higher likelihood of player retention due to the absence of a language barrier and access to a diasporic community to ease a player’s cultural transition between Abidjan or Algiers and Paris or Montpellier.
The National Women’s Soccer League doesn’t impose restrictions on overseas players beyond the number of spots each team is allotted, but that doesn’t necessarily mean clubs are equipped with the resources or cultural knowledge needed to nurture and retain African players.
Results have been mixed over the past few seasons.
Temwa Chaŵinga and Barba Banda have taken the NWSL by storm in their first years in the league, with Chaŵinga being a two-time and reigning Golden Boot and MVP winner with the Kansas City Current, and Banda earning 2024 NWSL Championship MVP honors with the Orlando Pride and currently leading this year’s Golden Boot race.
Those kinds of accolades from players hailing from relatively small African countries would naturally inspire an interest in bringing more players of their ilk into the league, but that hasn’t always worked out.
The Current recently signed two other African players — Kenyan midfielder Mwanalima Jereko of Kenya and Flora Marta Lacho of Angola — who have since been loaned to HB Køge in Denmark, a club that, like the Current, is owned by Angie and Chris Long. (Jereko signed a permanent contract with the Danish club last November and also featured in this WAFCON with Kenya.)
Ghanaian midfielder Stella Nyamekye had a standout performance at the 2025 WAFCON, generating even more excitement about the possibilities that awaited her with Gotham FC, who signed the then-19-year-old in December 2024.
The club instead sent Nyamekye on two separate loan spells to Fort Lauderdale United in the USL Super League before transferring her to Brann in Norway in March. Nyamekye’s Ghana teammate Princess Marfo experienced a similar back-and-forth when she left Nordsjælland and signed for Bay FC’s expansion year in January 2024, and returned to the Norwegian club two years later after making just nine NWSL appearances with Bay.
Marfo recently signed with PSV in the Netherlands, and Ghana, ranked 60th in the world, are still fighting for World Cup qualification. They, along with South Africa (ranked 57th), will compete in the FIFA inter-confederation playoffs later this year. Bay still has Zambian striker Rachael Kundananji on its roster, but has also lost Nigerian striker Asisat Oshoala since signing her from Barcelona in 2024.
And then there is the Washington Spirit. Including its new signings, the D.C. club boasted by far the most representation at WAFCON, with six players representing three countries: Rosemonde Kouassi of Ivory Coast, Deborah Abiodun and Gift Monday of Nigeria, Mélissa Bethi of Algeria, Alimata Bélem of Burkina Faso and newly crowned African champion Monique Ngock of Cameroon.
Except for Abiodun, whom the Spirit signed from the University of Pittsburgh, all other players came from European clubs. Their paths have been different — Abiodun was loaned to Dallas Trinity in the USL Super League, and Bélem will remain on loan to Eibar in Spain until the end of the year — but the club has set a high standard in how it recruits and retains African players from different regions of the continent. Spirit’s president of soccer operations, Haley Carter, oversaw many of the aforementioned players’ signings as well as Banda’s with the Pride when she was the team’s general manager in 2024.
It is no longer sufficient to consider women’s football in Africa as an emerging market.
The 2023 World Cup was a warning shot when Nigeria, South Africa, and Morocco all made history by reaching the knockout stage for the first time. If this WAFCON offers any indication, occurrences like that will soon become the norm in global tournaments.
African players will continue to climb up the Ballon d’Or nomination list until they are impossible to overlook. The question has never been about whether talent exists on the continent, but whether the systems that control the growth of the women’s game are willing to create space for it to truly thrive.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
NWSL, Women's Soccer, FIFA Women's World Cup
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