Aliou Cissé (Ziguinchor, 1976), captain of the Senegal team in 2002, is now its coach. He is a true legend in his country. Whenever Senegal has shone, he is there. In 2002 as captain and in 2018, when the Senegalese finally returned, as coach. This 2022, in the third World Cup of the lions of Teranga, as they are known, he remains on the bench. And it does so with more success on the record, since in 2021 Senegal won the Africa Cup of Nations for the first time. As thousands greeted the players in Dakar, Cissé climbed onto the roof of the bus with the cup in hand, raising it to the sky in triumph. He’s a natural winner who has bounced back from a lot of knocks; the hardest, that of the tragedy of And Joola. Then he played in the English Premier League, where he was the captain of Birmingham. Cissé asked the club for permission not to train after learning that 12 family members, including uncles, aunts, cousins and a brother, had lost their lives. The club granted him his wish without imagining that five days later he would return to the Sports City, with a sad laugh. “It’s time to look to the future,” he said. He asked to play in the first game after the tragedy. The team won and he played very well. His teammates frowned as he helped organize a friendly in Dakar between the Senegal and Nigeria teams to raise funds for the families of the victims. Impressed Birmingham fans collected money at the stadium gates to give to Cissé. And he gave them to other families who had lost loved ones.
Escape from poverty
Cissé was born in the Casamance region, in the south of Senegal. A Christian majority region in a predominantly Muslim state, where the Diola ethnic group lives and there is an independence movement that has caused violence to break out from time to time. There are few jobs, so young people migrate. Aliou also did it when he was nine years old with his parents, at suburbs from Paris, where he would manage to enter the football base of Lille. And, little by little, he succeeded, he even got to play for PSG. From the modest houses of Ziguinchor he had moved on to a nice apartment in the City of Lights, though without forgetting who he was. “Every time someone spoke Wolof, I turned my head. I used to go to Senegalese restaurants, because I missed the food of my country,” he recalled in an interview. As a footballer, he would play in the Premier League and touch the sky in that 2002 World Cup, in which the Senegalese were one step away from being the first African team to play in the semi-finals of the tournament.
Cissé has worked so hard that he is a fearless man. And a proud African who once asked the Senegalese Federation a key question: “Why do we keep looking for European coaches? That we don’t have good coaches?” The Federation chose him. And Senegal is living the best time in its history while he proclaims, in the Wolof language, slogans such as “Unity brings victory” and “We must be proud to be Africans”. Since leading the national team, everything is going well and now, if they defeat the Ecuadorians, they will be able to access the round of 16. “To be the coach of the national team today is to be a politician”, usually explains Cissé, who has come to see how on social networks there is a campaign to end up being president of the country. He takes it with a sense of humor. Always wearing a cap with the dreadlocks he’s worn all his life coming out of, Aliou Cissé is a great supporter of the future of African football. The five African teams present at the World Cup, in fact, have African coaches. Well, the coach of Ghana, Otto Addo, is German, but the son of a Ghanaian. “The successes of other African teams serve as a source of inspiration,” Cissé said in reference to Morocco’s win against Belgium. “Football is not a war. No one will die. But we can give joy to our people. And I come from a land where we like to win. I like to win” sentence.
