Benni McCarthy grew up in Hanover Park, Cape Town, won the UEFA Champions League with Porto in 2004, and scored 32 goals for South Africa across 79 caps. He is now coaching Kenya into the AFCON qualifiers he could never qualify for as a player. The full portrait.
Dieumerci Mbokani scored 254 professional goals, 122 in the Belgian Pro League, and 22 for DR Congo — more than any Leopard in history. He learned football at Bel'Or in Kinshasa and ended his career in Armenian football.
Denis Masinde Onyango was born in Kampala and spent 15 years at Mamelodi Sundowns. He won 12 PSL titles, the 2016 CAF Champions League, went to the FIFA Club World Cup in Japan, and was ranked the tenth best goalkeeper in the world. He is 41 years old and still at Sundowns. The full story.
He arrived at Chelsea for £24m and was booed by his own supporters within a season. He left as the club's greatest striker, the scorer of the goal and the penalty that won the 2012 Champions League final, and a man credited with helping pause a civil war.
Together they earned 311 international caps for Egypt, a Guinness World Record. Hossam Hassan scored 69 goals for his country, lifted the AFCON trophy three times, and is now Egypt's head coach. Ibrahim sat beside him as national team director, his identical twin.
In 1995, a man from a Monrovia slum won the Ballon d'Or. No African has won it since. George Weah scored one of the greatest solo goals in Champions League history, paid his national team's travel costs out of his own salary, and became President of Liberia.
Victor Osimhen won the Turkish league, reached the Champions League, paid for a fan to fly from Lagos to Istanbul, and cried in front of 50,000 people when the Galatasaray tifo went up.
He dribbled past Oliver Kahn with five touches and scored what Jürgen Klopp called the greatest goal in Bundesliga history. He won Olympic gold with a Nigerian team that came back from losing positions to beat Brazil and Argentina in the same tournament.
With the 2026 FIFA World Cup on the horizon and a preliminary squad announcement imminent, South Africa's football community is daring to dream — and the evidence suggests they have every right to.
With the 24th edition of Africa's premier track and field competition underway in Accra, we profile the athletes carrying the hopes, histories, and ambitions of an entire continent.
Victoria Mboko went from world No. 333 to the WTA Top 10 in twelve months. The Canadian-Congolese teenager is not just rewriting Canadian tennis history. She is opening a conversation about where African talent goes to become world class.
For a nation where women’s football only began taking structured form in the past decade, that number alone tells a story of rapid growth.
