Diagnosing what ails African sports: why I wrote a book about our invisible athletes

About a year ago, I was in Abidjan for the SportsAfrica Conference with a set of research ideas I had been turning over for years and no certainty about what to do with them. I had spent a long time working with athletes and sporting institutions across the continent, and I kept running into the same wall: systems that could not see the talent they claimed to be developing. 

I pitched the research to whoever would listen. I did not know that in doing so, I would meet the two people who would become my co-authors, and that within twelve months we would have produced a book.

That book — The Invisible Athlete — is many things, but it is first and foremost a diagnosis. It argues that African sport's most persistent failure is not passion, not talent, and not even money. It is documentation. Across most of the continent, athletes train, compete, develop, and disappear without leaving a single verifiable record in any administrative system. They are, in the eyes of the institutions that are supposed to serve them, invisible.

The issues that drove me to this research had been accumulating for years. 

I watched talented young Kenyans, including myself, shine on local pitches and then vanish — no pathway, no record, no explanation. I saw federations make selection decisions based on who a coach happened to know rather than any objective evidence of performance. I saw academies lose transfer money they were legally owed simply because they could not produce a PDF proving they had trained a player. 

And I watched, with growing frustration, as the continent rushed to adopt AI scouting tools and high-end analytics platforms, while still being unable to answer the most basic question: who are our athletes?

The encounter in Abidjan crystallised something. 

David Rutambuka — a researcher and former first-division footballer in Rwanda whose playing career ended abruptly due to a knee injury that was never formally recorded in any medical or sports system — brought a painfully personal dimension to the problem. His injury, undocumented, means that other players with similar physical characteristics may face the same preventable risk today. André-Michel Essoungou, who spent decades as a journalist and UN adviser watching African institutions fail the people they were built to serve, brought institutional clarity. 

Between the three of us, the conversations were intense and sometimes uncomfortable. We were challenging assumptions that had gone unquestioned for a long time.

What we learned in writing the book surprised even us. 

The problem is not primarily technological. The technology to register an athlete — a mobile phone and a 2G connection — already exists in almost every community on the continent. The problem is political will and prioritisation. Morocco's historic 2022 World Cup semi-final run was not built on magic. It was built on a centralised, verified talent pathway that tracked players from adolescence. The difference between the athlete who makes it in Rabat and the one who disappears in Conakry is not raw ability. It is the existence of a file that proves who they are.

Africa's governments, federations, and sporting organisations need to accept an uncomfortable truth: the documentation deficit is a policy choice, not an inevitable consequence of poverty. Federations must shift from organising competitions to auditing compliance — making verified athlete registration a condition of licensing, not a suggestion. Governments must legislate athletic identity the same way they legislate civic identity. No birth certificate, no vote. No athlete ID, no transfer, no selection, no development funding. 

The continent loses tens of millions of dollars annually in FIFA Solidarity Payments alone — money legally owed to African academies for training players who go on to professional careers — simply because no verified registration existed when the player was twelve years old.

For athletes, particularly young ones navigating a system riddled with unlicensed agents and fictitious contracts, a national registry is not a bureaucratic inconvenience. It is protection. An athlete with a verified record is harder to traffic, harder to exploit, and harder to discard. Documentation is a form of inoculation.

I did not go to Abidjan expecting to write a book. I went with a question that had been bothering me for years, and I found two people who had been sitting with the same question from completely different angles. 

What emerged from those conversations — and from the months of research, argument, and revision that followed — is our contribution to a problem that the continent can no longer afford to treat as peripheral. 

Africa's athletes are not invisible by nature. We made them that way. And we can choose to unmake it.

The Invisible Athlete: Why Africa’s Sports Systems cannot see their own talent - and what data infrastructure can do about it by Gordon Gogo Ouma, David Rutambuka PhD & AM Essoungou, with a foreword by John Ohaga SC, was published on 7 March.