If African football’s growing digital presence is constructed on top of AI-generated spectacle rather than authentic cultural expression, then the stadiums may be full, the social media numbers may be impressive, and the videos may look increasingly convincing, but it will still be hollow.
By Tuka Letura
With the FIFA Men’s World Cup just around the corner, both Senegal and Ghana released video content for their national team programmes: one a squad announcement, the other a jersey reveal. Both drew attention across multiple platforms. Given the moment, that was expected.
But here is why these two posts received far more attention than they ordinarily should have: both videos were generated with artificial intelligence.
On first viewing, something was already off. AI-generated videos are increasingly difficult to distinguish from footage actually shot on location, with occasional unnatural movement, the odd difficulty rendering certain faces, and details that most untrained eyes would barely catch. And yet you could still tell something was wrong, particularly with the video from the Ghanaian national team. The pronunciation of names was inaccurate, and a well-known Ghanaian folktale referenced in the video was rendered incorrectly.
African national team media have long sought to portray teams in ways that establish a direct connection between the squad and the country it represents—especially in the build-up to tournaments. This was clearly an attempt to achieve that on a budget, or simply a case of laziness. In this instance, it was evidently both.
Beyond that, there was a striking degree of carelessness involved. Alongside a fundamental misunderstanding of what this kind of content should do—and what genuinely creates that connection—there appeared to be little concern for what the final output actually looked like. That is one of the central problems with using AI-generated media for content that is meant to be a representation of identity.
And as much as one might try to overlook what meets the eye, what meets the ear is worse. Most African names — particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, and especially in a country like Ghana — are deeply tonal, and many cannot yet be accurately pronounced by current generative AI tools. As a result, several names native to parts of Ghana were mispronounced, including that of Anansi, the spider at the heart of one of Ghana’s most beloved folktales.
This is not a trivial complaint, nor an exercise in finding fault where there is none. It is a case of identifying where things have gone wrong and where they must not be allowed to deteriorate further. The Ghanaian and Senegalese national teams are not alone in producing this kind of content. Across the world — from Europe to Asia to the Americas — national teams have created videos to announce squads, unveil jerseys, and build momentum ahead of the World Cup.
So far, very few of those have relied on generative AI for roles as culturally significant as these. It therefore begs the question: where exactly is Africa heading with this growing dependence on a culture of artificiality within the world’s biggest game?
Practical alternatives exist. The Norwegian national team’s squad announcement is one example. Curaçao offered something even simpler: an artist in the studio received the names of the players and wove them into a song. It can be that straightforward. It is not always about doing too much. It requires intentionality, a sense of responsibility, and a genuine attachment to what is being done and why. Neither of those teams used generative AI.
Can AI reduce costs and simplify production? Yes. But efforts like these reveal an absence of real care for the team and no clear intent behind the media being presented to the world — media that ultimately represents not just the players, but their people, their cultures, their local communities, and their country.
When this media is consumed by diaspora communities, by younger generations engaging with their national team for perhaps the first time, and by international audiences forming impressions of the continent, what circulates must carry genuine cultural weight. The last thing you want is to misrepresent the reality it is meant to reflect. This is part of the historical record.
And yet misrepresentation is precisely what happens when the tools being used have no real understanding of the world they are being asked to depict. Generative AI, for all its remarkable capabilities, is trained predominantly on data that skews heavily towards the Global North. Its fluency in English, French, or Portuguese bears no comparable depth in Twi, Wolof, or Yoruba — at least not yet. Its visual models have a far more robust grasp of European stadiums and crowds than of the specific textures, colours, and fabrics that make African football culture visually distinct. When asked to represent Ghana or Senegal, it reaches for the nearest available approximation — and that approximation is almost always a distortion.
This is not a flaw that will simply disappear with the next model update. And even if it did, the output would still not be original. It still would not carry the lived reality of the people it purports to represent.
African football federations that lean on these tools without interrogating their limitations are not merely cutting corners. They are, perhaps without realising it, participating in a kind of cultural flattening — lending institutional authority to a version of their own identity assembled by an algorithm with only a passing acquaintance with the real thing.
That matters enormously in football, because football in Africa is one of the most powerful vehicles through which communities articulate who they are. Ghana is not a minor footballing nation — not at a World Cup — and in moments like these, what is owed to them is the telling of real stories. The same is true of Senegal.
An AI-generated video that mispronounces Anansi is not merely making an embarrassing error. It reveals a gap between what is true and what is not — a gap wide enough for stories to be distorted, and a signal that not nearly enough thought was given to warrant a second take. It also signals that the institution responsible for these teams did not consider their culture worth getting right.
The more insidious risk is normalisation. If AI-generated media becomes the standard for African football communications, it will gradually displace the local photographers, videographers, designers, storytellers, and musicians who currently do this work; people who bring both technical skill and genuine cultural knowledge to what they produce.
The short-term savings will come at the long-term cost of an entire ecosystem of creative talent that has historically given African football media its distinctive voice and soul. And once that ecosystem is hollowed out, rebuilding it will not be straightforward.
None of this is to say that AI has no role to play in African football media. Clearly it does. It can assist with translation, logistics, data analysis, and the faster production of certain kinds of content. But there has to be a meaningful distinction between using AI as a tool in service of a human creative vision and outsourcing the creative vision entirely to AI. The former can enhance and accelerate. The latter abandons the very thing that makes sports media matter in the first place. The sense that real people who care about the team and understand its significance are speaking directly to those who follow it, while simultaneously recording events.
The question African football federations need to ask themselves is not just whether AI can do this. The question is whether they are willing to accept what is lost when it does. Because what is lost is not going to be marginal. It is at some point going to be a crucial part of history. It is the tonal precision of a name spoken correctly in the language it belongs to. It is the folktale referenced with accuracy and love. It is the very core of human expressions, which no algorithm can manufacture on its own, that someone who genuinely understands and cherishes this team made something for the people who genuinely understand and cherish it too.
If African football’s growing digital presence is constructed on top of AI-generated spectacle rather than authentic cultural expression, then the stadiums may be full, the social media numbers may be impressive, and the videos may look increasingly convincing, but it will still be hollow.
Tuka Letura is an experienced sports writer with over five years of experience in the craft. He uses data and statistics to provide analysis and commentary. From regional to worldwide competitions, he has covered a wide range of sports-related events and topics. He is devoted to sharing his enthusiasm for sports with his audience and engaging them with interesting anecdotes and viewpoints.