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Opinion – AFCON’s fossil fuel affiliation will further damage Africa

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As the Africa Cup of Nations kicks off in the Ivory Coast, yet another tournament will ultimately serve to fill the pockets of those already destroying the continent.

While the self-confessed obsessed (like myself) will happily take all the football we can get, at times there is a bigger picture to consider beyond sporting merit.

Though I’ve no personal connection to the Africa Cup of Nations – the biennial tournament which pits the continent’s best teams against each other – it has always been regarded as a staple of international football steeped in rich heritage.

Following the mainstream media in the UK, the focal point of interest centres on which players are jetting off from the Premier League to partake in the contest, and what shape their respective clubs will be left in over the coming weeks.

Prolific talisman Mohammed Salah vanishing for six weeks is always a major cause for trepidation among Liverpool fans, for instance. Pep Guardiola is waiting menacingly in the wings.

As teams amass for the commencement of AFCON in the Ivory Coast this weekend, a topic that is sparsely considered, however, is exactly who stands to reap the benefits commercially – and the grim irony that their interests directly clash with those of the African people.

The competition’s full name this year is the ‘TotalEnergies AFCON 2023’, meaning a western oil baron is flying the banner on a continent which is disproportionately battered by the impacts of climate change.

This is made all the more ludicrous by the fact that the originally slated June ‘2023’ timeline was delayed to January 2024. Wishing to avoid the rain season and increasingly worsening extreme weather events – linked to the growing volume of anthropogenic carbon emissions – organisers have instead opted for the winter months.

In laymen’s terms, the hydrocarbon industry is wide awake to the harm it’s causing in Africa and will take proactive efforts to create more damage without niggly complications or disruption. This latest example highlighting the relationship between fossil fuels and football, brazen as it is, merely scratches the surface of the wider problem.

It’s easy to forget week to week when immersed in the topsy-turvy drama of the Premier League, but the likes of Manchester City and Newcastle are currently owned by petrostates in Saudi Arabia. The successes of both, past and present, ipso-facto are linked to the detriment of our planet’s ecology.

Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2020, state-owned energy giant Gazprom partnered UEFA across all tiers of European football, and Qatar outright hosted the World Cup in 2023. In cahoots with Fifa, the middle eastern nation shamelessly lauded the event as being carbon neutral, before a Swiss regulator proved the opposite to be true.

Thankfully, AFCON 2023 sponsor TotalEnergies has opted not to test the waters with hollow eco-conscious claims. The reality is that while Africa reportedly has great potential in the renewable energy sector, it has received a meagre 2% of global investment in the last two decades.

You can argue that global interest in the tournament will prove incredibly lucrative for several African economies, but any financial boon will not make a dent in the $100bn reportedly needed each year by 2035 to build climate resilience.

On that front, TotalEnergies has nothing to offer aside from yet more oil extraction and heaps of extra carbon emissions, the like of which will continue to exacerbate heatwaves, droughts, flash flooding, and the resulting spread of pervasive diseases such as cholera.

In a cultural sense, the return of AFCON is always thrilling and football fans are rightly excited to see the best players from the continent light up the international stage. Behind closed doors, however, we cannot ignore the fact that the spectacle is filling the pockets of those already destroying the region.

Tech Editor London, UK

I’m Jamie (He/Him), the Deputy Editor and a Senior Writer at Thred. Keeping up with social media updates and revolutionary technology is my forte, but when away from my keyboard, you’ll probably find me wrapped around a large Tango ice blast at the latest mediocre horror flick. Follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn and drop me some ideas/feedback via email.

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