Time to take sports seriously: the case for building African universities with professional sporting programmes

Africa’s sports economy is worth USD 12 billion today and projected to reach USD 20 billion by 2035 — yet to study sport professionally on this continent, you almost certainly have to leave it.

I know what it costs to study sport professionally. Tuition fees to a Kenyan institution, planning for flights to Madrid, accommodation in Barcelona, programme fees calculated in Euros. I am grateful for what the education gave me. But to be honest, I should not have to travel to Spain to get it. And I am acutely aware that the people who needed it most never got there - not because they lacked the drive, but because they lacked the money.

Africa’s sports industry contributes just 0.5% to the continent’s GDP, according to the African Sports and Creatives Institute — a fraction of the global sports sector’s 3% share of world GDP.

The continent boasts over 500 African players in Europe’s top football leagues, produced the 2022 World Cup semi-finalists Morocco, and will co-host the 2030 FIFA World Cup. Yet the professionals who govern, manage, market, and protect the athletes generating all of this value are predominantly trained and credentialled abroad. We train the athletes. We export them. And then we import the professionals to manage the commercial frameworks they generate.

To be clear: some serious sports education infrastructure exists. South Africa has built genuine capacity — UCT’s Postgraduate Diploma in Sport Management, strong programmes at UJ, Nelson Mandela University, and Durban University of Technology. These are real achievements. But South Africa is one country. Across the remaining 53 African nations, advanced sports education is either absent or limited to physical education modules that treat sport as recreation rather than as the governance system, economic sector, and data science problem it actually is.

The standard response is: scholarships exist. This is both technically true and practically useless. I received a 30% scholarship for one of my programmes. I am grateful for it. But 70% of a European programme fee still costs more than most Kenyan sports professionals earn in a year.

A 2023 UNCTAD report estimated that Africa loses nearly USD 4 billion annually to brain drain. The same dynamic applies to sport: we produce the knowledge — in coaching innovation, in athlete development, in tactical intelligence — and then we watch the researchers who could codify it take their expertise to institutions that pay them properly, publish the findings under foreign institutional names, and sell the knowledge back to us in textbooks we cannot afford.

There is a second problem that rarely gets named: the resistance of existing African universities to taking sport seriously. When African practitioners propose sports management programmes or sports law clinics to their local institutions, the response is typically dismissal. Sport is treated as something that happens on Wednesday afternoons. Yet sport is simultaneously a legal framework, a commercial sector, a data science challenge, a public health intervention, and a cultural institution. It is one of the most complex multi-disciplinary fields in the world. It deserves a faculty.

The ripple effects of this vacuum are everywhere. Federation officials making poor governance decisions were never trained in sports governance. Africa has almost no academic research on African sports economics or athlete development pathways — because there are almost no African institutions employing researchers in these fields. A 2026 study found that France alone gains over EUR 3 billion in player value through multinational eligibility mechanisms. That research was produced at a European institution. It should have been produced here.

I am calling for at least four fully accredited African sports universities — one in East Africa, one in West Africa, one in Central Africa, one in Southern Africa. 

Not sports departments within general universities. Dedicated institutions where sport is the primary discipline, covering sports law, sports management and business, sports science and medicine, sports data analytics, sports governance and policy, and sports journalism. Each should house a research centre producing continent-specific knowledge. Each should partner formally with national federations and international governing bodies.

I am calling on FIFA, CAF, World Athletics, the IOC, and every international sports body operating in Africa to redirect development funding from short-term infrastructure projects to long-term institution-building. I am calling on the African Union to establish a continental sports education framework under Agenda 2063. I am calling on private universities Strathmore, Ashesi, African Leadership University, Aga Khan University to move faster and more ambitiously into sports education. 

The demand is real. The talent to teach it is here. What is missing is the institutional conviction. 

Africa’s athletes are not invisible by nature. They have been made invisible by systems never built to see them. The same is true of Africa’s sports professionals. We are not absent. We are not underqualified. We have been made professionally invisible by the absence of institutions that would credential and channel our expertise. Building those institutions is an economic project, a governance project, and a protection project for every athlete who depends on trained professionals to know what they are doing.

We need four universities. We need them now. We have everything required to build them except the decision to start.

Gordon Gogo Ouma, ACIArb is a Kenyan advocate who advises on litigation, sports business, athlete management, implementing AI strategies, and governance. He is the founder of GMA Global Sports and Business, and co-founder of Afritech Sports Technology and Innovation Group.