Made in Africa: The History of African Players in English Football

INTRODUCTION

I love the fact that we have so many African players . . . until the Africa Cup of Nations starts. Then it’s ‘Oh my God!’ says Jürgen Klopp, breaking into his famous guffaw.

Six weeks to the day since Liverpool’s victory over Tottenham in the Champions League ended his personal run of six straight defeats in major finals, Klopp is in his office at the club’s Melwood training ground. For once, though, as he leans back on the sofa loading up a new vape, the former striker turned central defender, who has become one of football’s most famous personalities, seems to be only half-joking.

It’s still better than it used to be because before they were out in the middle of the season, he adds. In the past because the Africa Cup of Nations was in the winter it was really a reason not to sign an African player because you would lose him for four weeks in the middle of the season. That was really something we had in our minds always.

In purchasing Sadio Mané, Mohamed Salah and Naby Keïta in successive summers between 2016 and 2018, Liverpool broke the African transfer record three times. It has certainly paid dividends. Although Keïta – the Guinea midfielder who was handed Steven Gerrard’s famous No. 8 shirt when he moved from RB Leipzig in June 2018 for almost £53 million – struggled with injuries in his debut season, the goalscoring exploits of Senegal’s Mané and Salah of Egypt helped transform Liverpool from Premier League also-rans into European champions. Klopp’s views on the new scheduling of Africa’s biennial tournament would be put to the test a few days later when Mané’s Senegal side contested the final against Algeria in Cairo – his 55th game of an exhausting but prolific season – just two weeks before the Community Shield against Manchester City. The decision to move the 2021 tournament in Cameroon back to January would later test his patience even further, although the man who spent most of his own playing career at Mainz in the German second division before becoming one of the world’s best managers can claim to have played a special role in the story of African players in English football. Klopp admits he has been fascinated by the continent ever since he watched a bulldozing striker from Ghana make his name with Saarbrücken in the late 1980s. Anthony Yeboah, as Klopp and most of Germany still refer to him, was part of Eintracht Frankfurt’s exciting young team that was pipped to the Bundesliga title by Stuttgart in 1992, with the striker finishing as the league’s top scorer for the following two seasons.

Yeboah was one of the greatest strikers who played in Germany apart from Gerd Müller. He had a big impact on society, enthuses Liverpool’s manager, who also remembers some of the abuse one of the country’s first black players had to endure. In football we never thought about racism. If some idiots were shouting something, you realised it but you were saying, ‘Are you mad? What are you doing?’ There wasn’t social media so it didn’t get the awareness of today. It was usually a single person and if he did it, he would get a slap and go home. He wouldn’t do it again. But now of course it becomes more – there are more people – and the story becomes bigger and bigger through the reaction. It’s a shame that we are still talking about things like this but that’s how society is.

In 2014, a wall painting of Yeboah was unveiled on the side of a house in Frankfurt near Eintracht’s stadium with the message in German: We are ashamed of everybody who screams against us. It was taken from an open letter the Ghana international had written 24 years earlier, also signed by fellow professionals Anthony Baffoe and Souleyman Sané, the father of future Manchester City forward Leroy, to protest against racism. Yeboah would later follow in the footsteps of Albert Johanneson, the South African who became the first black player to appear in the FA Cup final 30 years earlier, when he signed for Leeds in 1995. Klopp also admits to a soft spot for Jay Jay Okocha – another African who would also go on to make a name for himself in English football with Bolton after first starring in the Bundesliga.

He scored the most spectacular goal in the history of German football, he remembers of Okocha’s brilliant individual strike for Eintracht against Karlsruhe in 1993 that goalkeeping legend Oliver Kahn joked in 2016 still left him feeling dizzy. It took like five minutes of Kahn and his defenders diving on the floor before he put the ball in the net! Some of the world’s best players have been from Africa. George Weah. Didier Drogba. Yaya Touré. In their generation they were some of the best players so why should we not sign them? It’s great.

The Liverpool side that defeated Spurs in Madrid contained their natural successors in Mané and Salah. Even with Keïta sidelined due to an injury he sustained in the semi-final against Barcelona before the famous comeback in the second leg, the presence of defender Joël Matip – born in Germany to a Cameroonian father – in his starting line-up certainly underlined Klopp’s appreciation of players with African heritage.

And then there was Divock Origi. The striker scored the second goal in the final against Tottenham to complete a fairy-tale story that had seen him almost leave the club the previous summer. Almost 30 years earlier, Origi’s father Mike Okoth arrived in Belgium from Kenya to pursue his dream to play in Europe. By coincidence, that was where Klopp’s wife had spent three years working as a teacher.

We are quite . . . as a family. I’m . . . my wife worked and lived in Africa, he explains, stuttering slightly. In Kenya. In a German school. Our elder son lived there for a couple of years so they are really interested in Africa. She was a teacher. She helped me to understand some of the culture.

Klopp first met Ulla Sandrock while she was working as a waitress at Oktoberfest in 2005 having moved back to Mainz from Kenya. Both had children from previous marriages and they were married within months.

In Nairobi I had a completely free hand in education, Ulla told German newspaper Der Spiegel in 2008. In Mainz, I first worked as a teacher at a special school, but immediately noticed: I can no longer make friends with the old-established methods. Everything has certain rules to follow; that drives me crazy. I’m like my husband. We ‘Kloppos’ need our freedoms to realise our potential.

Having left teaching to pursue a career as a children’s author, her first book – Tom and the Magic Football in 2008 – told the story of the fascination of the game, the longing for a distant heroic world, the common thrill and, above all, the sense of security that the child feels through the attention of the parents. Or, as Klopp – who wrote the foreword – puts it: It’s like Harry Potter but it’s about football. There’s no Harry Potter flying on his fucking stick – just football.

A year later, the sequel Tom and the Magic Football in Africa was published in which the eponymous hero and his friends travel to Africa to help save his friend Mucawe’s village on Lake Malawi from demolition by a Western industrialist who wants to build a hotel complex. Drawing heavily on Ulla’s own experiences of life in Kenya, it is a parable of fighting against the odds that her husband believes still applies to many of today’s African players.

What you cannot get any more is a special story which, in the good old times . . . he came from a working family, had nothing, he says. "In Europe it’s difficult to find that – maybe in London it’s possible, I’m not too sure. But all the African players have this story. It means they are motivated through the roof.

It’s about the story that is behind them, adds Klopp enthusiastically. If you look at Sadio Mané – running away from home. Mo Salah: driving four and a half hours every day to training. You have these stories there. You don’t have these stories here. I read an article about the influence of Mo Salah at this moment in the Arabic world – it’s unbelievable!

***

One of the best memories of my childhood is being allowed to stay up to watch England’s World Cup quarter-final against Cameroon in 1990. Inspired by 38-year-old Roger Milla and his famous corner flag wiggle, the Indomitable Lions had already lived up to their nickname by beating reigning champions Argentina in the opening match of the tournament and were within seven minutes of reaching the last four before Gary Lineker equalised from the penalty spot and then scored again in extra time. Despite their defeat, however, Cameroon’s success proved to be a watershed for African players in English football.

France and Portugal had a long history of raiding their former colonies for talented players for both their clubs and national teams – Moroccan-born Just Fontaine won the Golden Boot at the 1958 World Cup for the latter, followed by Mozambican Eusébio for Portugal in 1966. Yet England had remained a largely closed shop until the advent of the Premier League in 1992. Aside from exceptions like Arthur Wharton and Albert Johanneson, who were briefly feted during their careers only to fall into obscurity and alcoholism in later years, forgotten and broken by their experiences, it wasn’t until the likes of Peter Ndlovu, Lucas Radebe and Yeboah exploded on to the scene in the mid-1990s that things began to change. Just as Klopp and most of Germany had fallen in love with Yeboah a few years earlier, suddenly children in Leeds, London and Leicester were attempting to emulate his two brilliant volleys against Wimbledon and Liverpool in August 1995.

A budding striker myself, I was so infatuated with him that I would spend hours playing as the Black Stars on Sensible World of Soccer, with Abedi Pelé – the father of future Premier League players André and Jordan Ayew – and Nii Lamptey providing the ammunition for the deadly Leeds frontman. As the years went by and icons like Nwankwo Kanu, Okocha and Didier Drogba became Premier League cult heroes who transcended club allegiances, my interest in African football expanded, culminating in the decision to move to South Africa ahead of the historic 2010 World Cup. I still have a shaky video I filmed on a prehistoric digital camera of Luis Suárez’s infamous handball in the final minutes of extra time at Soccer City which prevented Ghana from going one step further than Cameroon by reaching the semi-finals. Seeing them eventually lose on penalties felt as painful as any of England’s numerous shoot-out defeats.

As well as admiration for some of the unbelievable talents who have graced English football, though, my obsession with African football stems from stories like Arsenal’s Christopher Wreh: a refugee from the brutal Liberian civil war who became the first African to win the league title in 1998. His journey from the slums of Monrovia to the glamour of the Premier League is an exceptional example of what Klopp was referring to: somehow there is something even more compelling about those players who started out with nothing yet still achieved their dreams against all the odds.

These days, you don’t have to look far for others. By March 2020, 278 Africans had played in the Premier League, scoring more than 1,000 goals since its inception in 1992. But that has only been possible due to the sacrifices of those who paved the way for superstars like Mané, Salah and Keïta. This book is an attempt to recognise the significant contribution they have all made to our game.

ONE

THE LONG WAIT

On a bright October day in 2014, a 16-foot bronze statue of Arthur Wharton – English football’s first African player – was unveiled in the memorial garden of St George’s Park. In attendance at the Football Association’s new £120 million headquarters were some of the main beneficiaries of his proud legacy, including Viv Anderson who became the first black player to represent England’s senior side 90 years after Wharton first arrived in the country from Ghana – then known as the Gold Coast.

In a way I can relate to him . . . said the former Nottingham Forest and Manchester United defender, his voice trailing away as he was interviewed by the FA’s in-house TV channel, but I wouldn’t like to imagine what he must have gone through in the 1800s playing football.

Anderson was right. For all his experiences of racism on the terraces during the late 1970s and early 1980s when black players were routinely subjected to vicious monkey chants and worse, the discrimination Wharton encountered throughout his life – on and off the pitch – was even more degrading. Designed by acclaimed sculptor Vivien Mallock, the statue of him diving acrobatically to tip a ball over the crossbar is one of the first things current England players of all age groups and races see when they arrive at St George’s Park. But the story of how it and six other replica statues – two of which now adorn the headquarters of both FIFA and UEFA – came into existence was, just like his own life and the subsequent history of African players in English football, far from simple.

For more than 60 years in a quiet corner of Edlington cemetery that was once reserved for paupers, just a few hundred metres from the busy A1(M) that connects north and south Yorkshire, the body of one of English football’s most important pioneers lay in an unmarked grave. Born in Jamestown, Accra in modern-day Ghana, Wharton moved to Shoal Hill College in Staffordshire, 20 miles from where his statue now stands, in 1882 to begin his training to become a Methodist minister. He was following in the Wesleyan footsteps of his father, Reverend Henry Wharton, who became the first missionary from the Caribbean to arrive in West Africa during the 1850s.

Wharton junior was destined to follow a different path. Within eight years, he had become the first man to record ten seconds flat for the 100 yards dash before emerging as the first black professional footballer in history. Had it not been for a letter published in the Rotherham Advertiser in October 1996, however, his remarkable story may never have been told.

I’d found out quite a lot about his football career by that stage through newspapers and local archives, remembers historian Phil Vasili. Towards the end, he moved across the Pennines to Stalybridge and the archives there had a team photo with Arthur in. I got totally obsessed with him. I was spending hours in different libraries around the country. All of this was without any funding. I was working as a lecturer for the Open University so I registered the story of black footballers in English football as a PhD but then Arthur took over . . .

In a desperate attempt to uncover more about the man who began his football career as a goalkeeper with Darlington before turning out for all-conquering Preston North End, Rotherham and Sheffield United among others, Vasili sent out a barrage of letters to newspapers in the areas he had played in appealing for anyone who knew Wharton’s wife, Emma Lister, to come forward.

By chance, a 65-year-old from Rotherham called Sheila Leeson happened to see his request. She was the niece of Emma Lister, who had died the previous year. Just a few weeks earlier, Leeson had discovered some intriguing photographs in her recently deceased mother’s attic of a young black man with a moustache standing next to a large distinctive trophy. With help from her son-in-law, research revealed that it was none other than the prestigious HH Prince Hassan Pacha Challenge Trophy, awarded to its 100 yards champion by the Amateur Athletic Association of England.

At first, Sheila didn’t know anything about her connection to Arthur, says Vasili. There was a lot of family folklore that had been passed down through generations. At first, Sheila had no idea that he was her grandfather. She found out that her Aunt Emma, who was Arthur’s wife, was not speaking to her grandmother because she had an affair with Arthur and had produced three children. That was why he ended up being buried without a headstone because it was a family that had been divided.

After responding to Vasili’s letter with the news that she had found what he was looking for, Leeson was invited to the launch of a new group called Football Unites, Racism Divides (FURD) in Sheffield in 1997, where former Everton and then Sheffield United manager Howard Kendall was the special guest. She revealed that they had identified Wharton’s final resting place as the cemetery in Edlington.

It was the start of the whole thing because that gave us the impetus to decide that we were going to get a proper gravestone for him, recalls FURD’s founder, Howard Holmes. Within a year we had enough to do it. Some of the money came from fans and the rest came from the PFA.

But that was only the beginning. In 1998, aided by research begun almost 20 years earlier by Ray Jenkins – who had lectured on African history at Staffordshire University – Vasili’s book The First Black Footballer: Arthur Wharton 1865–1930: An Absence of Memory finally told the story of an incredible sporting career that had so nearly been consigned to history.

Fergie sent along Dwight Yorke and Andy Cole to the book launch and they didn’t want to be there. They had faces like smacked bums, Vasili remembers of the former Manchester United strikers. I don’t think they really knew why they were there at that point but then they started looking around the exhibition and realised the significance of it. We gave them a couple of books and by the end of it they had got really interested in it. They ended up staying a bit afterwards to talk to me. That weekend they played against Wimbledon and scored three goals between them as they won 5-1. Afterwards they said, ‘We went to this book launch about Arthur Wharton and it really inspired us.’

***

A career as a sportsman wasn’t really an option for most people if, like Wharton, you happened to have been born in Africa during the 1860s. But it was even less likely if you had black skin. His father, Reverend Henry Wharton, who had moved to modern-day Ghana from Grenada a year before Arthur’s birth in October 1865, was the son of a Scottish merchant who had settled in Grenada and married a local woman of African descent. Reverend Wharton would later become the first African-Caribbean to hold the post of General Superintendent of the Gold Coast district of the Wesleyan Missionary Society and arrived in West Africa at a time when the mortality rate of missionaries was extremely high due to diseases like malaria and yellow fever.

His biography was published in 1875 – two years after his death – which explained that Arthur’s father had married Annie Florence Grant, whose mother, Ama Egyiriba, was a member of the Fante Ghanaian royal family. Her father had been a Scottish trader called John C. Grant, who was part of one of the most prominent families in the capital city of Accra. It turned out that Wharton’s uncle, Francis Chapman Grant, had been the proprietor of the Gold Coast Times and an important community leader who had organised campaigns against colonisation by Britain in the 1870s. Wharton therefore embodied, and was a product of, those destinations of the triangular slave trade route encompassing Britain, West Africa and the Caribbean, wrote Vasili in The First Black Footballer.

From an early age, the expectation was that Arthur would follow his father into the Church in a society where young men were encouraged to seek salvation through the trinity of the Cs: commerce, Christianity and civilised education, rather than on the games field. Immediately after Reverend Wharton’s death, Grant – one of whose descendants was the former Charlton, Luton and Millwall striker Kim – took Wharton under his wing and arranged for both him and his elder sister, Clara, to move to England to continue their education. Four years at the Burlington Road School taught them both the sensibilities of Victorian life before returning to the Gold Coast at the age of 14. Three years later, Wharton was back. But unlike some of his elder brothers and cousins who attended the celebrated Wesleyan institution Queen’s College in Taunton, Somerset, he found himself in the heart of industrial Staffordshire instead.

Shoal Hill College in Cannock may have been chosen due to the presence of headmaster Samuel G. Gwynne – a former teacher at Queen’s who had moved north a few years earlier having taught some of Grant’s own sons. Three Grants were already there, so the arrival of a dark-skinned gangly teenager in 1882 would not have raised too many eyebrows. Ill health forced Gwynne to close down the school two years later and Wharton moved to Cleveland College in Darlington to finish his formal education. But it was in the north-east town known for its association with the birth of the modern railway system that he displayed an aptitude for a different kind of pursuit.

Freed from the restrictions on sporting activity back home, Wharton had played football and cricket for Cannock, scoring a duck on his cricket debut but later going on to captain the side despite still being a teenager. He soon established himself as a first-choice goalkeeper for Darlington’s football club, who had been founded in 1883 and would go on to become one of the original members of the Northern League. Wharton was known for his unusual approach, which included a penchant for punching the ball long distances away from danger and the ability to make spectacular saves. According to Vasili, the father of Herbert Burgin, a lifelong Darlington fan, used to talk enthusiastically about the exploits of ‘Darkie’ Wharton in the Darlington goalmouth. He was a very athletic and energetic goalkeeper and became famous for crouching in the corner of the goal until the last minute when he would literally spring into action, diving across the goal to make fantastic saves.

The choice of position seemed strange given his undoubted prowess as a sprinter, which had been established during a series of handicap races held in Darlington not long after his arrival in the north-east. With prizes ranging from a clock to a fruit bowl, Wharton’s success encouraged his trainer, Manny Harbron, to enter him into the 100 yards dash at the prestigious Amateur Athletic Association Championship at Stamford Bridge in 1886. His surprise victory in a time of ten seconds flat made him the first black athlete to win a AAA title and the unofficial world record holder – a forerunner to Jesse Owens, Carl Lewis and Usain Bolt. A song was even composed to celebrate his victory, although Vasili admits in his book that frustratingly the words were never recorded. Another song, this time performed by his teammates to mark his outstanding displays for Darlington Cricket Club, received cheers of the heartiest, loudest and most enthusiastic in character in a display of appreciation of an athlete by athletes.

Wharton’s exploits on the track and on the field became big news in the emerging sporting landscape of late 1880s Britain. A series of ‘challenges’ against leading rivals took place around the country as he dedicated himself to the art of running fast, leading to him retaining his AAA title in 1887 and posing for the picture which Sheila Leeson would come across in her mother’s attic almost 110 years later. Yet while his football career also flourished as Wharton was snapped up by Preston North End – the era’s most dominant club in 1886 – his academic studies took a back seat. He chose, as I’m sure most of us would have done at his stage in life, the sweat, dirt and exhilaration of triumph and glory instead of a safe and pensionable post, wrote Vasili in his book Colouring Over the White Line. That went explicitly against the path chosen for him by his family back in Accra – a decision that would come to haunt Wharton in later years.

For the meantime, though, he was a celebrated figure of the period, even if his fame also came at a cost. The presence of a black sportsman in the public eye at the height of Britain’s empire did not play well with many people and Wharton faced constant reminders that he was not considered an equal. At one athletics meeting he overheard two competitors discussing their new rival, with one boasting, We can beat a blooming nigger any time. Confronting them face to face to see if they felt the same about their chances in a boxing match, the pair turned down his invitation. Wharton’s first victory at Stamford Bridge was not welcomed by everyone in the influential British press either. He was described as by no means a representative Englishman in appearance . . . he was a brunette of pronounced complexion who possessed an unusually long heel that was described as typical of men of colour. It was those kinds of attitudes which would follow Wharton to his grave.

The local newspapers played him up as a hero because it brought kudos to the area, says Vasili. "But the national newspapers, especially The Times, often referred to his ethnicity very early on. A lot spoke about his phrenology and the size of his brain and things like that. It’s really sad to see that kind of attitude after he had just won a race."

***

If the reception from his rival athletes and some members of the press was extremely hostile, Wharton’s move to Preston had at first provided some encouragement that he would be accepted by his peers. Renowned for secretly paying their players before professionalism was finally introduced in 1886, they reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup with him in goal, only to be beaten by West Bromwich Albion. Wharton was subsequently recommended by a well-known journalist for an international call-up – recognition that would have beaten Anderson’s record as the first black man to represent England by more than 90 years had it ever come to fruition.

Preston went one better the following season, reaching the FA Cup final at London’s Kennington Oval where they were again beaten by West Brom before going on to become the first side ever to complete the league and cup double in 1889, remaining unbeaten throughout the season. Unlike his teammates in the original ‘Invincibles’, however, Wharton cannot claim to have beaten Arsène Wenger, Thierry Henry and the rest to the feat because he had left Preston at the start of 1888 to sign a professional contract with Rotherham Town. It was the beginning of a five-year spell with the club which began life in the Midland League before progressing to the newly formed Division Two.

Salaries were obviously nothing in comparison to today’s superstars, however, and Wharton’s move to Rotherham was an indication that he had made a big decision. While his brother, Charles, was already established with a job in the colonial government back home, becoming a professional sportsman was confirmation that he had turned his back on his family’s wishes once and for all. Wharton also announced that he intended to run for money as a pedestrian, news that was taken in spite of his mother and relatives being strongly opposed. His hand had been forced somewhat by the closure of Cleveland College that summer but the lure of the track and pitch were too much to resist.

He was not fulfilling the historical obligation that the West African elite were meant to, explains Vasili. "Men of his class were meant to go back to the Gold Coast and get involved in business, religion or