Morocco lost its semifinal World Cup soccer match to France last year. The game was a reminder that soccer is thoroughly globalized; France’s hero Kylian Mbappé, the son of a Cameroonian father and an Algerian mother, is just one of many second-generation players from Africa playing in Europe’s premier leagues and on the top European national teams.
Excitement in the Arab and African community about how far Morocco’s team got in the tournament pointed to something deeper as well. More than 60 years after Morocco became independent, its national team was seen (implicitly if not explicitly) by citizens of onetime colonies as a welcome and exciting sign of a world that is finally being “decolonized.” Morocco’s success hinted at a future in which it would be no surprise to see Morocco or Côte d’Ivoire beat their onetime colonizer France on the way to an African country winning a World Cup.
But what can be said of football cannot be said of the development research community — a laggard, ironically, in the “decolonization” of top research on development.