Ivory Coast’s Soccer Factory: Where the Next Drogba Might Be Playing Right Now
Soccer 101
TSS
4.9 • 822 Ratings
🗓️ 31 October 2025
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We're continuing our look into domestic soccer in the countries that have qualified for the 2026 World Cup, and this week... it's Colombia!
We dive into Ligue 1 LONACI, the top flight of Ivorian football. How did it start, who dominates it today, and how does it stack up against the continent’s best? We try to determine why the league isn't stronger, where the young talent tends to go, and ask how the domestic game feeds into the national team’s success.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome everybody to soccer 101. My name is Taylor Rockwell, and I am very excited and a little bit nervous for today's episode. |
| 0:22.4 | We are 224 days until the start of the 26 World Cup. |
| 0:27.4 | If you are listening to this on the day we record it, then I got it edited and published on |
| 0:32.0 | time. |
| 0:32.4 | If not, then it's probably 223 days or fewer. |
| 0:36.2 | Graham Ruthven, with all that in mind, we're going to continue to talk about some domestic |
| 0:40.9 | leagues of countries that have qualified. |
| 0:43.1 | We've been around the world. |
| 0:44.9 | Where are we heading next? |
| 0:46.4 | So we've only done in this series where we are talking about countries, domestic |
| 0:51.3 | leagues that have qualified for the 2026 World Cup. We've only visited |
| 0:54.8 | CAF, I believe, once so far, which is partly because of how their qualification campaign |
| 1:00.8 | has a little bit backloaded. And so we didn't have any countries to talk about because none |
| 1:04.1 | had qualified. But in the last couple when those teams have started to qualify, we talked |
| 1:08.1 | about Morocco, right? And so today we are going to |
| 1:12.6 | talk about Ivory Coast or Cote d'Ivoire, if you like, and their domestic league. And I have |
| 1:19.1 | to admit, Taylor, this is a domestic league. I feel like I've got a very surface level knowledge |
| 1:25.0 | of a few African domestic league structures. Ivory Coast was not |
| 1:29.7 | one of them I knew next to nothing. And I found this to be, to be upfront about it, the hardest |
| 1:36.8 | episode in this entire series so far to research for very little English language information |
| 1:44.0 | out there about the league in Ivory Coast. |
| 1:47.1 | I had to rely on Google Translate quite a lot. |
... |
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