The Intimate Moments of Football Solidarity

Beyond politics and nationalism, the African Cup of Nations' most powerful moments show the bonds between those on the field.

At the Cairo International Stadium in 2019, Sadio Mané stood on the other side of grief, receiving rather than offering the quiet solidarity that asks nothing of politics and everything of the human heart. After Algeria defeated Senegal 1-0 in the final match of that year’s edition of AFCON, there was a poignant encounter between him and his coach, Aliou Cissé. Cissé read the script well and knew a thing or two about Mané’s heartbreak; the coach had been the captain of Senegal’s team that lost the 2002 African Cup of Nations (AFCON) final to Cameroon. Seventeen years later, Cissé watched his team, with its star player, succumb to a familiar anguish, but eventually rose to comfort a devastated Mané after the final whistle. Cissé wasn’t performing for the cameras or making a political statement; he was drawing on his own lived experience of the same crushing disappointment to offer the flowers of genuine comfort.

This moment of solidarity was a bridge for two generations of Senegalese footballers united in their shared vulnerability and unfulfilled dreams, recalibrating the coach-player relationship as something more human, fraternal, and heartfelt. It also made me think about why rituals like the pre-match handshake matter to football. Beyond its gestural fidelity to fair play, and along with the arm around a shoulder, the quiet word between rivals on the pitch, or even the social media commentaries of fans defending a player against the attacks of unkind punditry, I believe there is something there about solidarity that has only a little to do with the politics of football.

Indeed, at the magnificent Olembe Stadium, about 13 km from the city center in Yaoundé, where Senegal claimed its first AFCON title in 2021, football reminded the world that acts of solidarity are not always political. They also unfurl as intimate encounters on the soccer pitch, creating the conditions under which shared aims and convivial feelings transcend the assumedly normative domain of politics. Attuned to the fragile emotions, pleasures, and pathos of our shared human bonds and vulnerabilities, solidarity is enacted in the football event as a logic of friendship and human agency, rather than primarily as an obligatory ethic of partisanship. Some may hastily ascribe to the concept of solidarity a one-sided, particularly political meaning that connects it to the state, but this often entails little recognition of its moral and affective meanings, especially in the context of sports, particularly football.

We call it the beautiful game for a reason, after all. Its banter and beauty. Its boundless energy and affect, as well as the unfeigned wildness of its fandom, whether on X, Instagram, TikTok or in the dreamy worlds of the most electrifying stadia around the world. Yet, what stands out is football’s consoling gestures, its rituals of camaraderie in empathetic moments of heartbreak, and its cordial embrace of the freedoms of community—these also unfold the many delights and passions of the world’s foremost sport. These encounters define the spirit of the game, underscoring the admiration and solidarity among athletes who know that the beautiful game is marked not only by eye-catching goals and audacious dribbles, but also by generous hearts representing something more valuable than a country’s flag or a club’s anthem.

The ”unlikely sense of solidarity, even fraternity,” uniting a rather diverse group of the game’s fans who would ordinarily have little to do with one another” is well established, and so is the obvious solidarity that is routinely explicitly performed as an expression of resistance to power formations or simply as a statement of support for social and political causes, such as Athletic Bilbao’s October 2025 statement of Palestinian solidarity in their homage to victims of Israel’s war in Gaza before their game against Mallorca. Historically, AFCON has similarly offered several instances of solidarity in this inherently political shape, and there is much academic and popular writing on this, but what about AFCON’s more iconic examples of the intimate moments of solidarity, the kind one observes between players and officials themselves?

When Senegal and Egypt met in that Olembe final in 2021, for instance, most fans saw the showdown as a huge contest between then Liverpool teammates Sadio Mané and Mohamed Salah. Mané, who had earlier in the game been denied a goal from the spot-kick by Pharaohs’ keeper Gabaski, went on after the final ended goalless following extra time, to score the winning goal as Senegal beat Egypt 4-2 on penalties to clinch their first-ever Africa Cup of Nations.

Mané’s first instinct after the dramatic win wasn’t just to celebrate with his team; that could wait. The Senegalese captain immediately went to a distraught, weeping Salah in a familiar yet rare moment of solidarity that mirrors his own encounter with Cissé. That gesture is, of course, fundamental to true sportsmanship, but it was also a moment of solidarity, as Mané spent several minutes with his arm around Salah, whispering words of encouragement and shielding him from the cameras. In that instance, what was significant wasn’t personal honor but the club bond and mutual respect between both players. The numbers on the scoreboard and the glory of a shining trophy that day paled in comparison with the pure class and brilliance of character.

If the performance of solidarity I describe is between individuals, the example of the Zambian team in the 2012 AFCON final gestures towards its collective ethos. Zambia had just defeated what many considered the “Golden Generation” of an Ivorian team that had in its ranks Chelsea legend Didier Drogba and Manchester City’s great, Yaya Touré. A shootout similarly decided the game; the Zambian players were seen helping the Ivorian stars off the pitch, showing immense grace to Drogba, who had missed a decisive penalty. One could argue that the Zambians, overwhelmed with the spiritual weight of a win that took place in Libreville, Gabon—the very city where the 1993 Zambian national team had perished in a plane crash, were merely performing a key ritual of the game, playing fair, winning gracefully, and subsequently showing respect to an arguably stronger opponent. And this would be true, and in fact, is not limited to the African game.

When players comfort their opponents after tough defeats as one way to “combat all that is sad in the world” as Paul Pogba spoke concerning his embrace of a forlorn Leo Messi after France handed a second-round exit to Argentina at the 2018 World Cup in Russia, the best of us as human subjects emerge as a non-political expression of solidarity as an ecumenical yearning for community that is unbounded by culture. In this sense, the game articulates itself as a universal grammar of empathy whose echoes ricochet through the grandstands of conviviality, whether at Old Trafford, the Cape Town Stadium or the Maracana. At the same time, that Libreville final was a moment where the entire stadium appeared to recognize that the spectacle of football rivalry and competitive triumph was secondary to the history and tragedy an unexpected victory had honored.

I am not suggesting that intimate spaces are absolutely devoid of the political nor that football is all pleasure and genial encounters. While the personal can indeed be political, sometimes, intimate moments want to signify something other than politics. To the second point, forever standing in the shadow of this spirit of solidarity is, of course, its subliminal opposite, namely a propensity for violence among sporting actors and fans. While both arguably come from and are produced by the same ardor, the game truly mesmerizes us when its communal bonds prevail. At the same time, these intimate moments are not always centered on the tragic and awful. There are many instances during a game when players from opposing teams share laughter on the turf, or simply banter and humanity, despite the playful seriousness of their momentary adversarial contest. In these instances, the antagonistic drums of rivalry sound less forcefully than the sonic affections of human connections.

In the age of social media and other spaces of digital fandom, the responses of players to one another’s posts after a match, as well as their interactions with fans, have indeed become an essential component of the game’s archive and moments of intimate solidarities. When you see Nigeria’s Victor Osimhen posting on Instagram about a shared hug with his self-confessed idol, Drogba, you know there is an affective strain to solidarity that can’t be fully captured by politics alone. There is no doubt that social media can be toxic, as some players have discovered in recent years, but that space is also redeemed by the better angels of human nature, curating for us the digital afterlives of spontaneous on-pitch intimacies.

As the 2025 AFCON gets underway in Morocco, I will be watching out for Mané and Salah, and for Achraf Hakimi, the current Moroccan captain, and Osimhen, while keeping an eye on the social media memes of fan commentary, the gastropolitical banter of rival online fans, as well as the musical and dance “production” of the tournament itself. More crucially, I will also be looking out for these enactments of solidarity that remind us of our shared humanity. Not only AFCON’s “making of Africanity at the boundaries of nationality and citizenship,” nor the strategic uses of the game to consolidate the images of politicians and bureaucrats in the public realm. Not just the symbolic acts of politics that football is often called upon to perform—and, most times, rightly so—but also the intimate moments of our kinship as African players and fans. As humans.