THE HEADLINE
African sport is one of the continent's most valuable cultural assets, and this table asks who owns the businesses that capture its value. Scored across broadcast, competition rights, clubs and the player pipeline, the finding comes with a nuance the honest version has to carry: the rights are leaving, but the clubs are staying.
The single biggest fact is the broadcast pivot. MultiChoice/SuperSport — the dominant broadcaster of African sport, the company whose rands built the modern South African game — is now French-owned. Canal+ completed its takeover in 2026, reaching around 94% and then executing a compulsory squeeze-out, and delisted MultiChoice from the Johannesburg exchange. The most important distribution rail for African sport now answers to Paris.
But the picture is not uniform loss, and the table refuses to pretend it is. The top African clubs remain African-owned; an African broadcaster, Togo's New World TV, held continental AFCON rights; and African capital now owns clubs in Europe and the US. Authorship is overwhelmingly African, the rights and player-registration value is drifting offshore, and the club layer is holding. That mixed, layered reality is the finding.
WHAT THIS TABLE IS
Each entity is scored on three axes — authorship (African origin of the talent, fans and competitions), ownership (who controls it today), and value capture (where the money lands) — and the universe is deliberately cross-layer: a broadcaster (MultiChoice), a governing body (CAF), a rights-holding African broadcaster (New World TV), an international rights intermediary (IMG), a continental league (the Basketball Africa League), a multi-club group (Right to Dream), a player-pipeline academy (Génération Foot), a foreign pay-TV operator (StarTimes) and a flagship club (Mamelodi Sundowns).
That spread is the point, because African sport's ownership answer differs sharply by layer. Read the broadcast and pipeline layers and the value is going offshore; read the club layer and it is staying African. A single headline — 'African sport is being bought' — would be false. The layered read is what makes this a data cut rather than a slogan.
Every ownership fact is named and graded, and two things are corrected against common error: the Canal+/MultiChoice deal is complete, not pending, and Canal+ is French, controlled through the Bolloré group after its 2024 separation from Vivendi — not 'Vivendi-owned'. Where the market assumes a wave of foreign club takeovers, the evidence shows the opposite, and the table says so.
THE LEAGUE TABLE
The offshore-drifting layers sit at the bottom of the table. MultiChoice/SuperSport is Hollowed — an African-built broadcaster whose economic ownership is now French, with its South African licences ring-fenced in a locally controlled entity (LicenceCo) purely to satisfy the 20% foreign-voting cap on broadcast licences. StarTimes, the Chinese pay-TV operator with a large sub-Saharan footprint, is Hollowed for the same structural reason. The AFCON international media rights, brokered offshore by the US-based agency IMG for the 2023–2025 cycle, are Exported, and the player pipeline — academies like Génération Foot feeding European clubs such as FC Metz — is the clearest Exported case of all: African-authored talent whose transfer value is captured in Europe.
The middle band is genuinely Contested. CAF, the African governing body, owns the competitions but monetises them through foreign intermediaries and sponsors (TotalEnergies, Orange, Visa). The Basketball Africa League is played on the continent but operated and roughly half-owned by the NBA. Right to Dream is the fascinating reverse case: a Ghanaian academy, now majority-owned by Egypt's Mansour Group, that owns FC Nordsjælland in Denmark and San Diego FC in the US — African capital buying offshore assets.
And the top of the table is Retained. New World TV, a Togolese broadcaster, held the CAF free-to-air and pay-TV rights across 46 sub-Saharan countries for 2023–2025 — the first time an African company held exclusive AFCON broadcast rights. Mamelodi Sundowns, one of the continent's strongest clubs, is African-owned through Patrice Motsepe and Johann Rupert's Remgro. The retained cases are real, and they are not only survivals — some, like New World TV and Mansour's group, are African capital advancing.
THE BROADCAST PIVOT
The Canal+ acquisition of MultiChoice is the single most consequential ownership event in African sport, and it is done. Canal+ built its stake past the mandatory-offer threshold, the deal went unconditional, it reached around 94%, and it completed a compulsory acquisition of the rest in 2026, delisting MultiChoice from the JSE at roughly R55bn (about $2.9–3bn), R125 a share. The dominant broadcaster of African sport — and the owner of SuperSport, the channel that shaped the modern game — is now controlled from France.
The structure is worth understanding because it is the Hollowed archetype made literal. South African law caps foreign voting control of broadcast licences at 20%, so the licences were ring-fenced into a locally controlled entity, LicenceCo, in which South African shareholders (including the Phuthuma Nathi empowerment consortium) hold the voting rights, while Canal+ takes the economic ownership of the group above. A South-African-controlled licence shell now sits over French economic ownership. The licence is local; the value is not.
The commercial logic is also a warning sign. Canal+ bought a business whose subscriber base was shrinking — MultiChoice's total fell from around 17.3m in early 2023 to about 14.4m by late 2025, with the Rest-of-Africa base dropping from 9.3m to 7.5m and Nigeria the largest single source of the loss. Canal+ bought scale, francophone reach and the sport IP of a declining incumbent. What that ownership means for the price and availability of African sport to African viewers is the open question the pivot leaves behind.
THE NUANCE — THE CLUBS ARE STAYING AFRICAN
The lazy version of this story is a wave of foreign billionaires buying African clubs, and the evidence does not support it. The prominent owners of top African clubs are African: Patrice Motsepe and Johann Rupert behind Mamelodi Sundowns, Tanzanian billionaire Mohammed Dewji holding a large stake in Simba SC. The table looked for confirmed European, US or Gulf ownership of leading African clubs and did not find a pattern of it. The club layer is the part of African sport that has most clearly retained African ownership, and overstating a foreign takeover there would be simply wrong.
More striking still is the reverse flow. Right to Dream, founded as a Ghanaian academy, is now majority-owned by Egypt's Mansour Group, which used it to buy FC Nordsjælland in Denmark and to launch San Diego FC in Major League Soccer — African capital acquiring and building clubs in Europe and the United States. That is the opposite of extraction: ownership moving from the continent outward.
So the ownership story of African sport is not one-directional. The rights and the player-registration value drift offshore; the clubs hold African; and at the frontier, African capital is starting to own assets abroad. A serious read has to hold all three at once.
THE PLAYER PIPELINE — THE CLEAREST LEAK
If the clubs are the retained layer, the player pipeline is the exported one. African academies author and develop world-class talent, but the enterprise value that talent generates — the transfer and resale fees — is overwhelmingly captured by the European clubs that hold the players' registrations when the big sales happen. Feeder structures like Génération Foot's long-standing partnership with FC Metz institutionalise it: the talent is trained in Dakar, the resale value is banked in France.
This is the same finding our Victor Osimhen value-capture read traces at the level of a single player — the biggest financial events of an African footballer's career pay European clubs — seen here as a structural feature of the whole continent's game. The development clubs in Africa that first nurtured these players rarely share meaningfully in the nine-figure fees their graduates later command; FIFA's training-compensation and solidarity mechanisms are widely reported as under-collected.
The pipeline is where African sport's authorship and its value capture diverge most completely. The talent is the continent's greatest sporting export, and the money it generates is, largely, not.
THE COMPETITION LAYER
CAF sits at the centre of the competition layer, and it is genuinely Contested. It owns the crown-jewel competitions — AFCON above all — and AFCON 2025 in Morocco was a commercial record, with reported total revenue above $190m, sponsorship around $126m, and a reported 90%-plus surge in competition revenues. But that value is monetised largely through foreign intermediaries and sponsors, led by the French title sponsor TotalEnergies, and the history carries a cautionary tale in the collapsed 20-year Lagardère rights deal that cost CAF a reported ~$50m in arbitration.
The TotalEnergies renewal is a case study in why grading matters. Its value is genuinely contested in the reporting: figures range from around $300m to as much as $1.125bn across the 2025–2028 term, and the higher number would imply a roughly twelvefold jump on the 2016 rate. This table renders that as a contested band and refuses to state a single figure as fact — the honest exhibit shows the range, not a false precision.
The competition layer, then, is African-owned at the top (CAF) but foreign-intermediated and foreign-sponsored in its monetisation. The IP is the continent's; the machinery that turns it into money is substantially offshore.
SO WHAT — BY WHO'S READING
For investors and rights holders: the table is a map of where African sport's value is captured and where it is not — the broadcast and pipeline layers are offshore-tilting, the club layer is African-held, and the reverse-flow players (Mansour, New World TV) are where African capital is advancing. For research houses: the cross-layer ownership read is the licensable cut, and the correction it makes — that clubs are not being bought while rights are — is exactly the kind of nuance a database of deals cannot supply.
For policymakers and federations: the leak is nameable and so are the levers — training-compensation collection, African-held broadcast rights (the New World TV model), and sell-on structures that let development clubs share in transfer value. The pie is growing ($12bn toward $20bn by 2035); the question is capture share, not whether value exists. For African capital: the reverse flow shows the frontier — owning the rails and even the offshore clubs, not just producing the talent.
For everyone: African sport is not being lost wholesale. It is being unbundled — authorship everywhere, ownership splitting by layer — and the layers where the value is leaking are the ones where the levers now matter most.
METHODOLOGY
The nine entities were selected to span the layers of African sport — broadcast, competition/governing body, international rights, continental league, multi-club group, academy pipeline, foreign operator and flagship club — and scored on authorship, ownership and value capture (0–4), with the verdict following from the profile. All classifications are MonoKromatik's analysis. The cross-layer spread is deliberate, because the ownership answer differs by layer.
Two corrections are made explicitly. The Canal+/MultiChoice takeover is complete (2026 compulsory squeeze-out and JSE delisting), not pending — it is stated as done. And Canal+ is French, controlled through the Bolloré group after separating from Vivendi in the December 2024 demerger; it is not described as 'Vivendi-owned'. Where the market assumes a foreign-club-ownership wave, the table states the evidenced opposite — top clubs remain African-owned.
Contested figures are rendered as ranges: the TotalEnergies renewal is shown as a band ($300m–$1.125bn across 2025–2028), not a single number, because the reporting genuinely conflicts. The AFCON revenue and market-size figures are attributed to their sources (CAF; Oliver Wyman) and, where the source is an interested party, graded reported. Undisclosed deal values (the post-acquisition PSL rights renewal; StarTimes' rights economics) are marked undisclosed rather than estimated.
ENDNOTES
Key sources and grading (named per house standard):
1 — Canal+/MultiChoice: ~R55bn (~$2.9–3bn), R125/share; ~94% then compulsory squeeze-out and JSE delisting, 2026; Canal+ is Bolloré-controlled (post-2024 Vivendi demerger); LicenceCo structure for the 20% foreign-voting cap (Phuthuma Nathi consortium): Daily Maverick; TechCabal; MyBroadband; company statements. Verified.
2 — MultiChoice subscribers: ~17.3m (Mar 2023) → ~14.4m (Dec 2025); Rest-of-Africa 9.3m → 7.5m; Nigeria the largest single source of loss: MyBroadband; Nairametrics; company results. Reported.
3 — New World TV (Togo): held CAF FTA + pay-TV rights across 46 sub-Saharan countries, 2023–2025; first African company with exclusive AFCON rights: Sportcal; CAF; The Africa Report. Reported.
4 — CAF / AFCON 2025 (Morocco): reported total revenue >$190m, sponsorship ~$126m, ~90% revenue surge, 23 sponsors: CAF (interested party). Reported. Lagardère 20-year deal terminated 2019, ~$50m ICC payout: SportBusiness; Sportcal; InsideTheGames. Verified.
5 — TotalEnergies AFCON title renewal to 2028: value contested, reported between ~$300m and ~$1.125bn (2016 baseline ~$250m/8yr): Businessday; Sportcal; Nairametrics. Reported (contested — rendered as a range).
6 — Basketball Africa League: NBA + FIBA venture, NBA ~50%, franchise model: NBA.com; Semafor; Forbes. Reported.
7 — Right to Dream: Ghana academy, majority-owned by Egypt's Mansour Group (~$120m, 2021); owns FC Nordsjælland (Denmark) and San Diego FC (US): Sportico; Mansour Group; CityAM. Reported.
8 — Clubs: Mamelodi Sundowns (Motsepe / Rupert-Remgro), African-owned; Simba SC (Mohammed Dewji, Tanzania): shore.africa; contemporaneous reporting. Reported (cap-table splits not fully disclosed). No verified foreign-ownership wave of top African clubs was found.
9 — Player pipeline: Génération Foot (Dakar) → FC Metz feeder partnership since 2003; African transfer value captured by European selling clubs: CAF; CIES Football Observatory. Reported.
10 — African sports market ~$12bn → >$20bn by 2035: Oliver Wyman (via The Independent / bird story agency). Reported. All classifications are MonoKromatik's own analysis.
THE BEAR CASE
Where the 'authored here, owned there' read is weakest — and the case that foreign money and the reverse flow are good for African sport.
- —Foreign broadcast money professionalised the product. SuperSport's rands built the South African league into a globally competitive competition; Canal+'s scale and francophone reach may deepen investment in African sport, not withdraw it — and it extended the domestic rights it inherited rather than stripping them.
- —European academies and clubs create pathways that would not otherwise exist. The same system that captures transfer value also gives African players elite development and life-changing careers; for many, the alternative to the 'exported' pipeline is no professional pathway at all, and development fees do flow back to some academies.
- —African ownership is rising, not falling, at the layers that count most. New World TV holding continental rights, Motsepe and Dewji owning top clubs, and Mansour's group buying clubs in Europe and the US all cut against a simple extraction narrative — the club and even the offshore-asset layers are moving toward African hands.
- —Capture offshore is not the same as value destroyed. Record AFCON revenue, a richer title-sponsorship deal and rising transfer valuations mean the African-authored asset is being priced up, not hollowed out. The honest question is the share of a growing pie that Africa captures, not whether the value exists.
- —The broadcast base was shrinking anyway. Canal+ bought a MultiChoice that was losing subscribers and revenue on its own; foreign capital and scale may be what stabilises the distribution of African sport rather than what threatens it. Reading the deal purely as loss ignores the incumbent's decline.
We publish the counter-case because a read you cannot argue against is a read you cannot trust. Where the evidence moves, this section moves first.