James Kwesi Appiah on managing Sudan amid horrors of civil war

Each new day is a positive day for the footballers of Sudan – if there has been no ominous call from home. Those sorts of days are too scarce.

“The majority of times, we will receive a message that someone in the group has lost a relative, sometimes a parent,” reports James Kwesi Appiah, the manager of Sudan, a man at once overseeing a remarkable sporting story and knowing he can never fully cocoon that story from the realities of war.

“Really, those messages happen almost every time we have been together in the camp,” he adds.

There is no growing accustomed to news of a death in the family. Nor any pretence that fighting that has claimed tens of thousands of lives in the last two years and displaced an estimated 12.5 million does not shape the everyday experience of his group.

“There are so many people being affected by this war,” Appiah tells The National.

His job is to locate brief islands of peace, calm and hope. At its best sport can achieve that. And what he and the so-called Jediane Falcons, the national men’s team, have done over the past year is truly uplifting.

On Saturday, they meet Senegal in Benghazi, Libya, with the prospect of consolidating their lead in a fiercely competitive World Cup qualifying group.

If Sudan can hardly claim ‘home’ advantage in the fixture – they play none of their matches in Sudan because of the war – they are propelled by an extraordinary momentum.

Four matches into the group, Sudan are unbeaten. DR Congo, semi-finalists at the last Africa Cup of Nations, have been defeated; Senegal, Afcon champions in 2022, are already playing catch-up.

Top spot means a place at the finals in North America next summer. Finish second and there is a crack at achieving that via the play-offs.

Never, neither in peace time nor in war, have Sudan reached a World Cup. In the last half a century, they have made only sporadic visits to an Afcon finals, usually exiting before the knockouts.

Yet Appiah’s squad will be on the starting grid for the next Cup of Nations, beginning later this year in Morocco; Ghana, the four times African champions, will not be there because Sudan emphatically eliminated them in qualifying.

Senegal be warned. So too Algeria, whom Sudan face in Rabat in Afcon’s opening round in late December. Heavyweight status is no guarantor against Appiah’s bravehearts.

The coach, a 64-year-old who measures his words carefully, highlights the self-belief, the sense of mission that has helped drive Sudan, a group of footballers including no globally recognised stars but one full of motivation and purpose.

“The thing we can do,” says Appiah, “is make the people of Sudan happy.” More than that, the stirring victories, the rugged draws in difficult venues have genuinely produced their brief peace dividends, he notes. “We do know that when we are playing, guns get put down, maybe even for a week or two.”

The war has made nomads of Appiah and his players. The Sudanese league, where most of the national squad have always played their club football, has been suspended since the April 2023 outbreak of conflict.

Since then the workplace for most has oscillated between Saudi Arabia, where the Jediane Falcons have been offered a temporary headquarters to practice and stay, and, via a more unusual regional outreach scheme, Mauritania.

Last year, Sudan’s two dominant clubs, Al Hilal and Al Merrikh, were allowed to join the Mauritanian top division, assigned a full fixture list but without being candidates to win the title should either of them finish top of the table.

There was always a high chance of that. Sudan’s best clubs are competitive in pan-African competitions to a degree that Mauritania’s are not. Appiah notes the different standards but appreciates that for a significant number of his players, the regular club fixtures in West Africa “helps keep them active”.

For the Al Hilal men, there is also the sharper competition of the African Champions League, where they will contest a quarter-final with Cairo’s Al Ahly next month. Advancing that far is its own against-the-odds achievement, given the circumstances.

Appiah always believed in the strength of Sudanese football. He took the national head coach’s job a few months after the war began. He knew the Sudanese league, having coached at AC Khartoum just under a decade ago.

He has pioneering World Cup credentials, having guided Ghana to the 2014 finals in Brazil, the first coach from sub-Saharan Africa to have led his native country to a World Cup.

And he can certainly meet a challenge. Ghana’s expedition to Brazil, dogged by disputes over alleged unpaid bonuses to players, was fraught. He handled it with dignity.

Also fraught, way back on Appiah’s long and distinguished CV, was the 1982 Afcon in Libya, when he was a respected Ghana player. In spite of distracting issues at home – such as the aftermath of a military coup – Ghana went on to win that event.

Now, 42 years on, Appiah finds himself the architect of Ghana’s demise, Sudan’s 2-0 victory over his countrymen last autumn, following up a goalless draw between the countries in Accra, pushed the Falcons into the 2025 Afcon at Ghana’s expense.

It felt poignant. He’d ideally have liked both teams to have progressed, but “at the end of the day, you have to be professional”. His commitment to Sudan was uncompromised. He had been obliged to give up a senior role with the Ghana FA to avoid any suggestions of a conflict of interest.

In recent weeks, Appiah has found himself taking a firm position with the Sudan FA, too, over delayed payments to his staff, a potential complication in the soaring progress of the national team, but one he hopes has been solved and will not prove disruptive ahead of Sunday and the confrontation with a star-studded Senegal.

Glance at the teamsheets, and the Senegalese can only look daunting: Sadio Mane up front, Kalidou Koulibaly at the centre of defence, the Monaco prodigy Lamine Camara in midfield. But on paper, so did Ghana’s Black Stars last October, the likes of Mohamed Kudus, Jordan Ayew and Inaki Williams, household names in the English Premier League and Spain’s La Liga.

Appiah’s players inhabit a different club environment. His forte has been to remind that need be no indicator of skill, or worldliness.

“I always realised there are good players in Sudan, but not many have travelled away to play for clubs abroad,” he says. “It’s about the right mentality. I say to them, ‘Don’t belittle yourselves. You’re strong and athletic. You’re high quality players. See yourself as the best’.”

That belief, and what Appiah calls “a very core” of experienced men such as striker Mohamed Abdulrahman, midfielder Abuaagla Abdallah and defender Ramadan Agab, has lately proved a magnet to some new faces.

Talent has been grafted into the squad from the large Sudanese diaspora. “There are Sudanese all over the world,” notes Appiah. “And we’ve been getting calls from players based in Europe, North America, Australia.”

His standards are high, and his is not an easy squad to break into. But players such as defender Abdelrahman Kuku, born to Sudanese parents in Cairo, brought up from the age of six near Sydney, Australia, and ushered into a professional career via a university football scholarship in the US, have strengthened the talent pool.

In turn, Kuku’s club career has been shaped by Sudan’s unexpected sporting fairy-tale. He now plays for Al Ittihad in Libya, where the domestic league lifted some of its restrictions on the number of non-Libyans allowed to register at local clubs specifically to give opportunities for Sudanese players.

The temporary base in Saudi Arabia has been hugely beneficial, too. “The facilities, the hotel, the nutrition and the pitches are top class,” says Appiah.

Having a Gulf foothold to call ‘home’ for preparation means the Jediane Falcons have been able to organise useful friendlies such as last week’s draw with Oman.

It gives them somewhere to bond. It is their sanctuary, a deluxe one for a group of sportsmen acutely sensitive to the fact they represent a frightened constituency spread far and wide.

“We hear from people following our matches from everywhere, from the [refugee] camps in Chad, from South Sudan,” says Appiah. “And of course in the country itself. What we can do is put a smile on their faces.”