Carpe Diem for Cabo Verde – Why African States Must Finally Convert Their Soft Power in Sports

When Professor Simon Chadwick and Dr Paul Widdop published their “Soft Power World Cup” ranking in Forbes this month, one name stood out for me. Not Norway, the surprise winner, whose collective self-belief and drum-beating Viking Row captured global audiences. Not France, second, projecting effortless luxury through a Jacquemus collaboration. Cabo Verde: fifth. An archipelago of just over 500,000 people, off the coast of West Africa, qualifying for the World Cup for the first time and advancing out of its group.

Cabo Verde’s soft power moment was not manufactured by a marketing agency. It was the story of Vozinha, the goalkeeper whose mother was initially unable to travel to see him play because of a visa barrier; global sympathy ultimately moved the United States government to waive its normal process. Chadwick and Widdop call it “triumph in adversity.” I call it something else: proof that African nations do not need the budgets of Qatar or the fashion houses of Paris to command the world’s attention. We need stories, and we have them in abundance.

Soft power is not a vanity metric

The late Joseph Nye defined soft power as attractive power: the ability to shape preferences and behaviour through appeal rather than coercion. It sounds intangible. It is not. Attraction converts into measurable things: tourism arrivals, foreign direct investment, trade relationships, diaspora remittances, and the willingness of global institutions and sponsors to do business with you.

The World Cup is the most concentrated soft power platform on earth; 48 nations perform before billions of viewers. For most African federations, the question after a tournament is “how did we play?” The better question is “what did the world now believe about us, and what are we doing with that belief?”

The multiplier effect: from attention to GDP

This is where soft power stops being a diplomatic curiosity and becomes an economic strategy. The chain works like this:

Attention leads to arrivals and investment; arrivals and investment to infrastructure and industry; infrastructure and industry to skills and jobs; and skills and jobs to GDP.

Morocco is running this play in real time, and the early numbers deserve our attention. After hosting AFCON 2025, the Moroccan government reported direct revenues of between €1 billion and €1.5 billion, roughly 600,000 tournament-specific foreign visitors, and around 100,000 new jobs, with its Industry and Commerce Minister citing a revenue-and-investment multiplier of 1.82. Crucially, Rabat says AFCON has already funded about 80 per cent of the sports infrastructure it needs to co-host the 2030 FIFA World Cup with Spain and Portugal; this makes Morocco only the second African nation, after South Africa in 2010, to host football’s biggest event.

Two honest caveats, because credibility is the currency of this argument. First, those figures are the Moroccan government’s own; independent economists have questioned both the scale of the returns and the fiscal risk, given public debt levels, and the multi-billion-euro spend has drawn domestic protest. Second, the academic literature on mega-events is clear that windfalls are not automatic; Qatar spent an estimated $200 billion on 2022, and no serious economist argues it recouped that in direct economic terms. The lesson is not “host at any cost.” The lesson is that Morocco treated football as an instrument of a wider national development vision, spanning high-speed rail extensions, hotel capacity and airline fleet expansion, rather than as an end in itself. The stadium is the excuse; the transformation is the point.

What the multiplier actually requires

Soft power without a conversion strategy evaporates the moment the final whistle blows. Chadwick and Widdop close their ranking with exactly this warning: the challenge for their five winners is sustaining the advantage. For African nations, I would frame the conversion strategy around four pillars:

1. Skills development and acquisition. Every tournament, academy, broadcast deal and sponsorship activation is a classroom. Sports lawyers, data analysts, physiotherapists, event managers, broadcast technicians, brand strategists; these are exportable, high-value skills. If we import this expertise for every major event on African soil, the multiplier leaks offshore. If we train our own, it compounds at home.

2. Job creation across the value chain. Morocco’s reported 100,000 AFCON jobs were not all in football. They were in hospitality, construction, transport, security, media and services. Sport is one of the few industries where a single event mobilises a dozen sectors simultaneously; the multiplier materialises only where local content is deliberately built into procurement and staffing.

3. Institutional credibility. Soft power is fragile. A governance scandal, an unpaid squad, a collapsed stadium project; each one converts attraction into ridicule. Investment follows trust, and trust follows sound governance, transparent federations and enforceable contracts. This is not the glamorous part of the business of sport. It is the load-bearing part.

4. Narrative ownership. Cabo Verde’s story travelled because it was authentic. African nations should resist the temptation to imitate Norway’s aesthetic or France’s polish. Our competitive advantage is our own material: the depth of our fandom, the resilience of our athletes, the creativity of our supporter culture. The world is already watching AFCON; 2.5 billion viewers reportedly tuned in across 118 countries for Morocco 2025. The audience exists. The question is who profits from it.

The call to action

Here is my challenge to federations, ministries, investors and, above all, the young professionals of this continent: the 2030 World Cup will be played partly on African soil. That gives us a four-year runway to build the human capital that captures the multiplier, rather than watching it accrue to consultants and contractors flown in from elsewhere.

At BOS Africa, this is precisely why we exist. Our schools (Sports Business, Sports Data, Sports Branding and Sports Leadership) are building the pipeline of African professionals who will negotiate the contracts, analyse the data, tell the stories and govern the institutions of African sport. We operate across eight African countries, and we are expanding.

If you are a federation or government thinking seriously about legacy, talk to us about capacity-building partnerships. If you are an investor, the African sports economy is no longer a speculative thesis; Morocco has put numbers on the table. And if you are a young African who watched Cabo Verde this summer and felt something shift, do not let that feeling end with the tournament. Enrol. Train. Position yourself inside the industry before 2030 arrives.

Soft power got the world’s attention. Skills will keep the value.

By Beverley Agbakoba-Onyejianya (Founder and Academic Director, BOS Africa)