African Football Teams and Their Joyful Entrances

The World Cup in Canada, Mexico, and the United States, which begins this week, will see a record 10 African teams participating. African football has been on the rise, with Morocco becoming the continent’s first team to make the semifinals of a World Cup in Qatar 2022. More teams will mean more chances to see African football succeed, but also a better chance of experiencing the particular kind of joy that African footballers bring to the game. 

That joy was on full display in the last iteration of AFCON, held in Morocco between December 2025 and January 2026. This was not only a football tournament with a controversial final, but also a place for the teams taking part to showcase their countries’ cultures.

Many teams arrived in traditional garb, inspiring magazine-like photoshoots, as they took part in a somewhat new trend: arriving at the stadiums’ corridors for their games — some with a Bluetooth speaker in hand, some with just their voices — singing and dancing along to songs meant to represent their country and their team spirit.

Angola, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe all had these musical entrances, which they also used to showcase popular dance moves from their countries.

Propelled by the Confederation of African Football (CAF) and the social media pages of various African influencers, the videos of these musical entrances went viral not only in Africa but also worldwide. They showed a ritual very different from what we were used to seeing from footballers before a big game: instead of aloof, focused players burying their thoughts and emotions behind big headphones, we had teams gleefully bonding and rallying together to music. And not just any music, but songs that spoke to their national character and their identity as a team. Songs that can tell a story beyond football.

Cameroon and Nigeria

This trend had been going strong at the 2023 AFCON in Côte d’Ivoire, and even before that, both Cameroon and Nigeria had already been doing musical entrances in 2021. But I want to highlight one of Nigeria’s songs that really tells the story of the team and the country. 

Before their semifinal game against South Africa in 2024, the Super Eagles arrived dancing —  with a speaker on defender Ola Aina’s head — to a Nigerian football classic: “Super Eagles Carry Go” by Austin Milado. In Milado’s song, gyration and church-style praises went to the 1994 Nigerian team, the first to play in a World Cup.

Although Milado was (and remains) a mostly unknown musician, his song almost instantly became a hit synonymous with the Super Eagles, with bars, and TV and radio stations playing it before and during games, and the song’s call-and-response refrain of “walele” became a fan rallying cry for the team.

However, Milado said that in 2002 the Nigerian Football Federation threatened to sue him for misuse of the Super Eagles brand, and that he therefore has seen little money from his massively popular song. In 2024, the same year Aina held that speaker over his head, blasting his song, Milado went on a press tour of Nigerian outlets, trying to regain credit for his song. He also dropped an updated version, “Super Eagles Reloaded,” which includes contemporary players. But it is the original version that blasted from the speaker in the 2023 and 2025 AFCONs, the same one that is still popular throughout Nigeria.

South Africa 

The Super Eagles and the Indomitable Lions didn’t make it to the 2026 World Cup. But after the huge popularity of the musical entrances trend, there is a good chance we'll see it rekindled. AFCON, of course, is an exclusively African affair. And the World Cup is a global stage where maybe not everyone will appreciate these displays of emotion, which are less common in football outside the continent. But that is exactly the place where African teams could use these entrances to tell their stories and cement their identities.

Of the ten qualified teams for this year’s competition, only one of them made a musical entrance in this year’s AFCON: South Africa’s Bafana Bafana. 

Led by goalkeeper Ronwen Williams and midfielder Mohau Nkotu, the team arrived at their games singing Gwijo songs, a musical tradition of the Xhosa people of South Africa.

South Africa will play Mexico in the opening match of the tournament, their first World Cup match since hosting in 2010. And Williams has already promised that Bafana Bafana will bring “energy, color, and flair” to the tournament. So we can hope we’ll get to see him leading his team in Gwijo chants once more.

Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Egypt

Other teams that did qualify already have some inspiration to draw from. Ivory Coast made “Coup du marteau” by Tam Sir a somewhat official anthem during their AFCON 2023 run, and even sang it in the dressing room after winning the tournament. 

Senegal is remembered for their musical warm-up during the 2018 World Cup in Russia, and their fans are known for dancing nonstop before, during, and after their games. 

Meanwhile, Egypt danced to Moroccan music as they arrived at this year’s AFCON. Could they be the first North African team to come in with a musical entrance?