This presentation was delivered at the Play the Game 2025 conference in Tampere, Finland. It builds on my earlier analysis ‘Stadiums, Statecraft and the Diaspora Surge in African Football.‘
The script published below extends that analysis by adding China as another decisive player that becomes essential when African states cannot meet the demands of an international institution-– in this case, the Confederation of African football —and how this strategic positioning favours Beijing. I am publishing this verbatim as delivered on stage.
A few weeks ago, at the United Nations General Assembly, President Trump gave a speech that explicitly challenged the mandates of global institutions. Trump’s critique goes beyond rhetoric as his administration announced it would withdraw from UNESCO, the World Health Organisation and re‑evaluate its commitments to bodies such as the United Nations Human Rights Council.
This pushback against international institutions is not unique to Washington. In the United Kingdom, Brexit itself–the decision to leave the European Union—was a fundamental challenge to a multilateral institution. And the UK’s proposed immigration/deportation deals, involving countries such as Rwanda and others, raise direct tensions with United Nations multi‑country conventions like the Refugee Convention and human rights treaties.
Even here, at Play the Game, part of the agenda is to question international sporting institutions: FIFA, the IOC, WADA. The questions who empowered them? Who watches them? What scope do they assume? Are akin to the same questions that the US is asking about the UN institutions and the UK asked of the EU.
In other words there’s a growing multilateral fatigue—a looming question over the legitimacy and mandate of international institutions especially by states in the west.
On the other hand, In 2017, Xi Jinping delivered a speech in which he defended globalization, declaring that “the global economy is the big ocean you cannot escape from.”
More recently, in 2025, Xi reaffirmed multilateralism and, in a BRICS summit address he said economic globalization is an “irresistible trend of history,” and warned against protectionism, while calling for the United Nations‑centered system to be preserved.
Even though China was long excluded from major global institutions, was constrained within them or was skeptical about them, it now seeks to not only to participate, but to influence their trajectory.
So: why is China doing this? Why invest in the legitimacy of institutions which the very nations, states and parties that created them are questioning them? And how is China benefitting from the mandates of these multilateral institutions to its own gains?
Over the next few minutes, I will illustrate how China becomes essential not just to multilateral institutions in Africa, but to the African states who cannot meet the demands of these international institutions, and how this eventually benefits China economically and diplomatically.
I will juxtapose two kinds of international institutions: the International Monetary Fund and the Confederation of African Football, whose mandates may differ– macroeconomic stability on one hand, football governance on the other—but their enforcement logic in Africa is strikingly similar.
Essentially, both of these institutions set technical standards that states must meet in order to participate in the global system. However meeting these standards often requires resources or infrastructure that many African states cannot provide on their own. And it is precisely in that space—between the demand and the ability to meet it—that China positions itself.
On the economic front, I will use Angola as a quick case study for the purpose of illustrating how the pattern replicates in sport.
After decades of civil war, Angola emerged in the 1990s with shattered infrastructure and an urgent need for reconstruction finance. And in the global system, for a country to be eligible for loans from multilateral and bilateral lenders, it first needed the approval of the International Monetary Fund. The IMF sets the conditions on the borrowing country such as demanding they liberalise the economy or cut state subsidies.
Angola was expected to clear its arrears (which they owed western lenders) and adopt a package of reforms which they could not meet but China stepped into that gap with oil backed funding that enabled Angola to repay arrears to western lenders and to move forward with reconstruction.
And this is how China becomes essential within the sporting institution:
During the 2022 World Cup qualifiers, the Confederation of African football banned 20 of Africa’s 54 countries from hosting home matches because their stadiums failed to meet the technical standards.
Without compliance, national teams are usually forced to play “home” games in other countries, spending millions on travel and forfeiting home advantage.
And again, the gap between CAF’s demands and the capacity of African states is where China becomes essential.
Most of these stadiums are built and renovated by Chinese state-owned enterprises who provide the financing, the construction and the labour.
Granted, China has built stadiums in the continent long before CAF’s recent wave of stadium bans. According to AidData, as of 2017, China had financed at least 164 stadium construction or rehabilitation projects across 40 African countries—with the highest concentrations in DR Congo, Zambia, and Cameroon.
Even so, without the mandates by CAF or FIFA, be it world cup qualifiers or the Afcon tournaments, African states would have little incentive to plunge into debt for stadiums even when they risk becoming economic boondoggles.
In return, what does China get?
Today 53 of 54 African states recognise the People’s Republic of China; Eswatini is the only country that still maintains formal ties with Taiwan.
Another payoff for China is access to African resources, markets and the adoption of its currency.
While African states open their economies and markets to China, China keeps tight capital controls at home. In other words, China is able to benefit from the mandates of liberal global institutions, to access African markets and resources in ways that it does not reciprocate domestically, since they regulate foreign presence and investment in their own yard.
What does Africa get?
For states and politicians, Chinese financing delivers visible infrastructure—stadiums, highways, ports—that are instrumental to political capital and can be showcased to citizens. China also provides an alternative source of money when the IMF or World Bank shut the door, and it creates some policy space. A new stadium or a new highway also gives governments legitimacy on the international stage.
However, the very basic needs for African citizens often remain unmet, even as high-visibility projects are completed. According to Afrobarometer, across 39 African countries only about 44 percent of households have reliable electricity, and nearly 400 million people still lack access to clean drinking water.
Furthermore, the way some of these projects are financed drains resources that were originally earmarked for sport itself. Take Kenya’s Talanta Stadium which is being built by China for the AFCON 2027. The loan will be repaid out of the Sports Fund which was created to channel tax revenue from betting companies into grassroots athlete training, youth academies, and community programs.
This means that every shilling which will be used to pay for the stadium is a shilling not spent on community facilities, or not spent on youth leagues. Simply put, the stadium will glitter, but the wider sporting ecosystem risks remaining underdeveloped.
So when Donald Trump critiques the Paris Agreement under the UN climate framework by saying China builds windmills abroad while not using them at home—there is, strangely, a resonance for me as an African. Although Trump’s statement is factually wrong—China does use wind power domestically, I recognise the pattern: I know all too well about China building stadiums in Africa because the mandates of an international institution made them necessary.
So, what is the way forward? I think the solutions I can best propose are going to lean towards the best interests of Africa, which is, we have to decentralize from the state, because despite being the first gatekeeper, it is colluding and conspiring with foreign actors against its citizens. There are some protests across Africa with the youth protesting against states’ policies- in fact one was in Morocco and they were protesting against stadiums primed for the FIFA World Cup. There is a role for the diaspora and private investors to decentralise from the state, agitate for liberalisation that benefits us and enables us to work for ourselves. It does not make sense that a Chinese investor will have regulations and state bureaucracy relaxed but I as a citizen, cannot have that privilege.
It is also a telling sign of how the “Left” have abandoned material and structural issues such that Africans are finding resonance within Donald Trump’s rhetoric. Because when there were questions about global institutions in the 1990s and how detrimental they were to the global south, these questions came from labour unions and the discourse was that globalization was serving corporations and elites at the expense of workers, the environment, and the Global South. That reality has not changed.