One question for each 2026 World Cup team. Can DR Congo make up for 50 years of lost soccer time?
Would you love me in a Bentley? Would you love me on a $95 bus from downtown Boston to Gillette Stadium? Footnote is asking 48 questions, and they’re all about the 48 teams at the 2026 World Cup. This post is part of our Group K preview. You can also read previews of Colombia, Portugal, and Uzbekistan.
Can DR Congo make up for 50 years of lost soccer time?
The Democratic Republic of the Congo will make their first World Cup appearance, though it’s more complicated than that. History in central Africa tends to be.
In 1974, DR Congo was known as Zaire, and they were the first sub-Saharan African team to qualify for the World Cup. That team was a particular passion project of then-dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
Mobotu took a keen interest in the success of Zaire’s national team through the early 1970s and reportedly gave each player a house and a green Volkswagen after they clinched qualification. This was a golden period for soccer in the nation, with that World Cup qualification following a championship at the 1974 Africa Cup of Nations.
Then it all fell apart, first for Zaire as a soccer team and then for Zaire as a nation. The Leopards went winless in West Germany, including a humiliating 9-0 loss to Yugoslavia. This led to Mobutu pretty much losing interest in the national team project. The team entered 30 years of decline, along with the rest of the nation which suffered under Mobutu’s policies of ethnic violence and kleptocracy.
Mobutu was forced out of power in the late 1990s, but the on-the-ground situation in the Congo remains grim. Starting in 2025, violence between the Congolese government and the M23 rebel group reignited in the eastern region of the country, the latest outbreak of conflict that dates back to the mid-1990s and has caused the deaths of an estimated six million people.
So it is not with unqualified joy that Congo return to the World Cup hoping to fulfill some of the lost promise of 1974. The Congolese players will line up to represent a country undergoing one of the most severe humanitarian crises in recent history. Like I said, Congolese history is complicated. 1And all of this is not to mention that the current state of the Congo is arguably the result of a series of historical dominoes starting with the possibly CIA-aided assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first president of an independent Congo.
But the World Cup goes on regardless, and after a long period when the only headlines involving the Congo involved horror and war and displacement, it would be great for a soccer team to provide the hundreds of millions of Congolese people around the world with a reason to wave the flag with joy.
So half a century on from the historic false start of Zaire’s World Cup run, how will their much-delayed successors perform?
Based on consensus ratings like ELO, they are a long shot to escape the group. Ranked 45th by FIFA and 54th by ELO, they will need to beat Uzbekistan and pull off a remarkable upset against either Portugal or Columbia to advance.
And they do have a solid core of European based players, with a backline anchored by captain Chancel Mbemba and rising Premier League star Noah Sadiki as the engine in midfield.
But for a team that comes to the World CUp in part to avenge a bit of history, the most delightful thing about this DR Congo team is the throwback way that they set up. In their World Cup qualification playoff final against Jamaica — arguably the biggest Congolese football match in generations — manager Sébastien Desabre rolled out an old school 4-4-2, down to having a little man and a big man up top.
That attacking two of Cédric Bakambu and Yoane Wissa is also one of Congo’s great strengths. Bakamku is a tall, bruising center forward, someone who has carved out a 15-year career in Europe less by scoring goals and more by physically moving center backs out of the way so his teammates can score. Wissa, meanwhile, is a shifty Swiss Army knife, a striker-slash-winger who pops into space, combines with teammates in midfield, and darts in behind to finish chances.
Bakambu and Wissa would seem to have complimentary skillsets, and if they can click, they might provide Congo with exactly the weapon needed to pull off an upset and advance from the group
Football can’t fix the last 50 years of Congolese history. But this team has an opportunity to at least set one thing right, and provide their nation with the World Cup result they have been waiting for since 1974.
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