Football - Djibouti: A national team in perdition

Appointed in June to everyone’s surprise given the complicated context, the French coach Stéphane Nado will have only held up for six months on the one-year contract he had signed with the Djibouti Football Federation.

With experience in Mauritania and Morocco, two federations that function much more professionally than the FDF, the gap was as brutal as the results: 5 defeats for 1 goal scored and 14 conceded!

No sufficient relief
Limited demographically with just over a million inhabitants and a small diaspora, Djibouti had experienced a surge under the impetus of its president, Souleiman Waberi, who had allowed a young French coach, Julien Mette, coach from 2019 to 2021, to work freely and to impose elaborate game principles.

If the results followed, with a deserved qualification for the main qualifying round at the 2022 World Cup beating Eswatini (2-1), the deterioration of the work environment, the disorganization and the interferences with an increasingly absent president tarred progress.

Thanks to a young generation embodied by the midfielder Warsama Houssein, one of the only local players to play in Europe (Belgium, Malta), the team offered an enjoyable game with the incorporation of a professional binational born in Norway, Anas Farah Ali. A fleeting experience despite a goal against Niger, mainly because of a federation unable for example to properly buy plane tickets and sometimes saved by the son-in-law of the President of the Republic, Tommy Tayoro, the owner of AS Arta Solar 7 who has won the title three times since 2021.

Unable to perpetuate this legacy of a few years or to prepare the succession of a historic defender like Daoud Wais, the team has once again become stuck in the last place in the FIFA ranking, today 196th between the Cayman Islands and Tonga.

A naturalization policy to 'compensate'
To remain a minimum competitive and compensate for obvious athletic limitations, Djibouti has bet on the naturalization of several players playing in the local championship.

Lacking a good level goalkeeper, the Burundian goalkeeper Innocent Mbonihankuye was the first to benefit from this opportunity in 2019 after four good seasons with his team from the University of Djibouti.

The next ones didn’t even need as much time since the Nigerian Samuel Akinbinu played for the Red Sea Sharks only two years after his arrival at AS Arta/Solar 7. With ten goals in twentythree caps, he is considered the best scorer in the modern history of the selection.

Another striker, the Ghanaian Gabriel Dadzie, made his debut in 2022 after four titles as top scorer of the Djibouti championship while a young binational born in Marseille, Yonis Kireh, joined the national team last year while continuing his club career with an American university team.

A new and  «interim» coach
Not having the same financial and human resources as most of the continental federations, the Djiboutian selection will always have a glass ceiling. Nevertheless, internally, several players have expressed their frustration for years to Sport News Africa regarding the lack of seriousness and project.

After the six-month Nado intermission, the FDF appointed a 'temporary' coach according to its own press release in the person of Mohamed Meranah Hassan, the current U23 coach. A short-lived choice therefore to prepare for the challenging qualifying round of the AFCON 2027 which is about to take place against South Sudan.

And if the South Sudanese are also going through a crisis, optimism does not reign in Djibouti where several national football players are still waiting for the implementation of a concrete strategy. Problem, with a president increasingly absent but so proud of his appointment to the FIFA Council, and a sometimes interventionist state that ultimately did not complete its investigations into money laundering, embezzlement and false invoices against several leaders of the federation, the future appears more than ever uncertain on the shores of the Red Sea...