The summer qualifying rounds for the Champions League are over, so we now have the 36 teams that will take part in the League Phase. There were a few surprises along the way: Fenerbahçe knocked out Lyon, LASK Linz pulled off an extraordinary comeback against Celtic, overturning a 0-3 first-leg defeat with a 5-1 win in the return, while Azerbaijan’s Sabah secured the first qualification in the club’s history for the main draw of a UEFA competition. Then there is Slovan Bratislava, who had never managed to get through the summer qualifiers before — their last appearance in the old European Cup dates all the way back to 1976 — and who beat Slovenia’s Celje. And there is more: the Slovak side has made, and will make, African football history, because they are coached by Yaya Touré. On the first matchday of the League Phase, he will become the first African coach to take charge of a team in the Champions League’s main draw.
Yes, Yaya Touré has a huge history in European football, is known all over the world and therefore occupies a different place from coaches who have built their careers in Africa. But the fact remains: before him, no other African coach had ever made it this far in the competition. The nearest anyone came was Nigeria’s Ndubuisi Egbo, who took Albanian side FK Tirana through the Champions League qualifying rounds in 2020, without reaching the group stage. Egbo was also the first African coach to win a domestic title in Europe, again with Tirana.
Another notable precedent is Jean Tigana, born in Bamako, the capital of Mali, but brought up in France from childhood: he played for the French national team, winning Euro 1984 as one of its key players, and later, as a coach, took Monaco to the Champions League semi-finals against Juventus in the 1997/98 season. But, again, this is a borderline case, different from Yaya Touré’s. He was born and raised in Ivory Coast, started playing football in his home country and moved to Europe when he was 18. The former Barcelona and Manchester City midfielder never represented another country, playing only for Ivory Coast at Under-20 level and then for the senior side. As a coach, he worked as an assistant at Olimpik Donetsk in Ukraine, Akhmat Grozny in Russia, Standard Liège in Belgium and with the Saudi Arabia national team, before spending a season in Tottenham’s academy. Slovan is his first job as a head coach, and it has already been enough to make history for his continent.