By African Meridian | Media
The confetti of the World Cup has barely settled, and African football is already turning the page. Across the continent, federations, coaches, and players are pivoting to the 2027 Africa Cup of Nations, with qualifiers slated to begin in September 2026 — and an unfamiliar name sits atop the early list of favorites: DR Congo, whose commanding World Cup campaign has installed the Leopards as heavy contenders for a title they last won when the tournament, and the country, carried different names.
The compressed calendar leaves no room for a leisurely reset. Barely two months separate the World Cup’s conclusion from the first qualifying matchdays, a turnaround that transforms this summer into a sprint of squad evaluations, coaching appointments, and tactical stocktaking. Ghana and South Africa are already searching for new head coaches following the departures of Carlos Queiroz and Hugo Broos, and they are unlikely to remain the only benches to change hands before September. Federations know the arithmetic: a stumble in the early qualifiers, with a new coach still learning his squad, can poison an entire cycle.
Into this churn strides DR Congo with a momentum no rival can currently match. The Leopards’ World Cup run — advancing from their group and pushing England to the limit in a narrow Round of 16 defeat — did more than restore national pride; it revealed a team of genuine substance. A settled tactical identity, a spine of players in their prime years at strong European and African clubs, and a fanbase reawakened to the glories of Congolese football history have combined to produce something the continent has not seen in decades: DR Congo as front-runners. The two-time champions — winners in 1968 and 1974, in the era of the great Zaire sides — have spent most of the intervening half-century as a sleeping giant. The World Cup suggested the giant is awake.
The Leopards will not walk to the trophy, and they know it. The continental field has rarely been deeper. Morocco, twice-consecutive World Cup quarterfinalists, possess the continent’s most complete football infrastructure and a squad accustomed to the biggest stages. Egypt’s knockout-round campaign confirmed the Pharaohs’ enduring class, and the record seven-time champions never need extra motivation for continental competition. Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and Algeria all retain title-caliber talent, while Cape Verde’s fearless World Cup adventure served notice that the era of easy groups is over for everyone. The qualifiers themselves, spread across international windows into 2027, will be less a formality than a first battleground — recent cycles have routinely claimed at least one traditional power as a casualty.
There is also the question of what the World Cup’s lessons mean for AFCON’s stature. The continent’s collective performance — four teams in the knockout rounds, historic runs celebrated worldwide — has elevated the perceived standard of African international football, and with it the prestige of the continental crown. The 2027 tournament, to be hosted in East Africa by the Kenya-Uganda-Tanzania “Pamoja” bid, will bring AFCON to a region starved of hosting duties for decades, promising new stadiums, new audiences, and the tournament’s first genuinely tri-national staging.
For DR Congo, favoritism brings its own tests. The Leopards’ golden generations of the past were undone as often by administration and expectation as by opponents, and converting World Cup form into a continental title eighteen months later requires the kind of institutional steadiness Congolese football has not always enjoyed. But in Kinshasa, such cautions are being drowned out by something the city’s football public has earned the right to feel: belief. September will begin the answer to the question all of Africa is now asking — whether the World Cup was DR Congo’s arrival, or merely their announcement.