Africa could break the glass ceiling of winning the World Cup in the next 10 years, partly thanks to a platform highlighting to foreign clubs the most talented youth from the continent, the co-founder has boldly claimed to AFP.
Morocco’s surprise run to the 2022 World Cup semi-finals sparked hopes that such a moment is not far off.
Benjamin Balkin, though, thinks Eyeball, the digital platform he co-founded in 2020, could be the determining factor in ensuring that happens as it provides a shop window for talent which would previously have been missed.
“Those players leaving African academies and going to European or American academies, their football understanding skills, IQ will improve, because of just a better level of training, better infrastructure,” Balkin told AFP from Copenhagen.
“When those players come back and play for the national team, the national teams will also benefit from that and perform probably at a better level.
“So maybe if we speak again in 10 years, we’ll have an African nation that has won the World Cup, that wouldn’t be surprising.”
Balkin’s friend and now colleague Oliver Durr Dehnhardt experienced how difficult it was to acquire African talent when he was a scout at Dutch giants Ajax.
“We made a partnership with Cape Town FC in South Africa for a few years,” he told AFP.
“It didn’t work out. We got one player out of it and it was still too messy.
