World Cup Question

[Abe Sargent]

I just took Ukraine to a third place finish in the 2010 WC in FM as a Ghanaian coach, and that got me thinking:

What is the highest an African manager has ever gotten a national side in the World Cup?

I did some quick research and couldn't find out. I guess this is really two questions, possibly:

What's the best a manager who claimed the nationality of an African nation did?

What's the best a manager of African descent took their nation, no matter the nationality claimed? (So a manager with English nationality but originally from Mali or third generation black or somesuch.)


-Anxiety

[MIJB#19]

The easy way to find it, you'd think would be looking at the coaches of African teams. But apparently every African team that survived the first round of any world cup tournament was from non-African heritage:

Ghana (2006, R16, coach: Ratomir Djukovic (Serbia-Montenegro))
Senegal (2002, QF, coach: Bruno Metsu (France))
Nigeria (1998, R16, coach: Bora Milutinovic (Yugoslavia))
Nigeria (1994, R16, coach: Clemens Westerhof (Netherlands))
Cameroon (1990, QF, coach: Valeri Nepomniachi (USSR))
Morocco (1986, R16, coach: Jose Faria (Brazil))

Going by nationality, I seriously doubt any African coach ever managed a non-African team out of the first round. Simply because it was rather uncommon to use foreign national coaches before the 1990s, while after that usually all coaches came from established soccer countries (as in countries who reached the semi finals at some point.)

And after that it becomes even more tricky. How do you determine whether a 'black' person has African heritage? How do you determine how far back it goes? If you take it very loosly, there could be (not knowing there is one) for example a coach who had a grandparent born in South Africa. I'm not really a fan of making such lists, but maybe you should start at figuring out which coaches are/were 'black'. Maybe some Brazilian coach could qualify?

[Abe Sargent]

Good research!