One question for each 2026 World Cup team. Was AFCON 2023 a fluke, or is the Ivory Coast back?
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 E preview. You can also read previews of Curaçao, Germany, and Ecuador.
Was AFCON 2023 a fluke, or is the Ivory Coast back?
The 2023 African Cup of Nations featured one of the strangest championship runs in the recent history of international football.
Hosts Ivory Coast started well enough, with a straightforward victory over Guinea-Bissau. Then the wheels came off, first with a narrow loss to Nigeria and then with a humiliating 4-0 defeat to Equatorial Guinea
The Ivorian federation had seen enough and — despite the fact that Les Elephants actually qualified for the knockout stage as one of the best third-place teams — fired coach Jean-Louis Gasset and replaced him with assistant Emerse Faé mid-tournament.
From there, things seemed almost scripted for the Ivory Coast: Dramatic, narrow wins against Senegal, then Mali, then Congo DR, and finally Nigeria saw them win a remarkable turnaround title.
Did that title mark the Ivory Coast’s return to the pantheon of the best of the best in Africa?
If you were introduced to the game in the early 2000s, the mythology of Ivorian football weighs heavy. First there are the players of that era, titanic names like Didier Drogba and Yaya Toure who won everything that there is to win in Europe. Then there was that generation’s seemingly cursed quest to win AFCON: Two penalty shootout losses in the final before finally reaching the continent’s pinnacle in 2015 without Drogba by winning a comically long shootout against Ghana.
And if that wasn’t enough there was the civil war. While the peace was not permanent, and football was not the only factor, it is undeniably true Ivory Coast’s golden generation at the very least paused a long-festering civil war in the country by qualifying for the World Cup in 2006. Drogba’s remarkable locker room speech pleading for peace united the country for at least long enough for the team to compete in its first ever World Cup and to then play a few highly symbolic matches in the heart of rebel territory.
Ivory Coast has not been to the World Cup since that summer in Germany, and the greats of the 2000s have all moved on. In their place is a squad loaded with talent who have not quite written themselves into global mythology yet.
This is a relatively top-heavy squad, headlined by attackers like Amad Diallo and Inter Milan striker Ange-Yoan Bonny. Nicolas Pepe is notorious as an Arsenal flop in England, but he has carved out a nice career as a reliable winger in France, Turkey, and Spain since leaving England.
The young talent to watch on the squad is Yan Diomande, a Leipzig winger who at just 19 has rapidly ascended from high school soccer in Florida to one of the best attacking prospects in Europe. The Athletic recently reported that Leipzig are going to demand $116 million for anyone who wants to sign him this summer.
The Ivory Coast also boasts a midfield full of veteran operators. Seko Fofana was arguably the best player at AFCON 2023 and is back at Porto after a quick stint in Saudi Arabia. Captain Franck Kessié is still in Saudi Arabia but remains a competent and reliable midfielder. For years, Ibrahim Sangaré was coveted as a potential next big thing in transfer rumors. Instead he has become a pretty good Premier League defensive midfielder, which is a much less exciting thing to call someone but a nonetheless valuable asset for a national team.
The 2023 AFCON win was something between a miracle run, incredible luck, and everything clicking into place at once. But if the Ivory Coast can perform this summer, it will also serve as an incredible origin point for a new era of Ivorian football, the kind of larger-than-life myth that defined legends like Drogba.
It’s up to the new generation of Ivorian stars to prove that their AFCON title was step one in a new story, and not a surreal anomaly.
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