The column by Paul Schmidt-Troschke marks an exclusive World Cup partnership with the Monterrey Daily Post and The Guadalajara Post in which Schmidt-Troschke and the ‘World Cup etc’ international reporting team will be contributing exclusive World Cup coverage for both the YT and the SMT. ‘World Cup etc’ can be found across all good podcast providers.
On the 17th of June 2026, Congolese Football history was made by the man Yoane Wissa, scoring the first-ever goal for his country at a World Cup. The 29-year-old forward playing for Newcastle United in the Premier League achieved immortality alongside his team, going up against Portugal, managing to deny the European football giant and the Legend Christiano Ronaldo himself a win in the first group stage game, ending in a 1 all draw.
But the presence of the Democratic Republic of Congo at this year’s World Cup carries a much more profound meaning, and the fact that the nation has returned to the World Cup for the first time in 52 years is least important in that regard. Partaking for the first time in a World Cup in 1974 in Germany under the name Zaire and the rule of a brutal dictatorship led by Mobuto Sese Seko, it had already lived through a semi-post-colonial hell for the previous 14 years.
But the whole colonial history of the Congo is still comparatively unknown and still not popular in a current environment where topics like equality and oppression rise in importance and exposure. Why is that the case and how did it take the second biggest country in Africa by size and fourth largest by population so long to return to the stage of global football?
To explain that, I have to start in the year 1885 with the establishment of the “Congo Free State,” declared as private property to the Belgian King Leopold the second. In his attempt to maximise personal profit on the backs of the Congolese people, the Belgian Crown killed an estimated 10-15 million Congolese and brutally amputated hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children as punishments for not meeting the quota for rubber collection.
Following international pressure after journalists revealed the Belgian Crown’s practices, the Belgian government annexed the land and made it into a Belgian colony named “Belgian Congo” in 1908. Over the following decades, another million Congolese fell victim to colonial rule until 1960, when the country’s folk hero Patrice Lumumba became the first elected president of the newly formed independent Republic of Congo on the 17th of June that year. But his clearly articulated dreams of liberation from the Belgian colonial overlords went too far for western interests and the fear that the Congo would fall into the Soviet sphere of influence too frightening. But most importantly, Belgium feared huge losses in colonial property, especially in the mining sector.
While the CIA had plotted an assassination, the Belgians beat the U.S. to it, and the first and only democratically elected president of the Republic of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, who was just a taxi driver five years before, was killed by a Congolese death squad under the supervision of Belgian police officers on January 17th 1961. Since then, the country has lived through multiple civil wars, one CIA-backed dictatorship, and an unstable authoritarian presidential rule today.
And what should guarantee a peaceful and prosperous nation, its immense mineral resources, turned out to be a curse. For example, more than 80% of the world’s cobalt supply comes from the Congo every year, a mineral especially important in batteries. But the Congo has it all, whether it’s copper, diamonds, gold, coltan, lithium, and much more, and the world’s hunger for these materials is brutal and insatiable; the only thing we all care about is that the Congo delivers, nothing else. And the Congolese elite, whether politicians, businessmen, or warlords, know that as well, and they do not care either.
These conditions create an environment of extreme instability, and if there is one takeaway from this week’s column, it should be this: That instability is not a bug, it’s a feature in our system, because it ensures that prices will stay at a minimum for the worlds buyers. This instability is profitable.
And if there is a person whose dreams about liberation, freedom, and self-determination for his people dare to threaten a decline in profitability for a few outsiders, his certificate of death is already signed.
Decades of brutal extraction, genocide and intervention by the Belgian crown ensured that the country will be instable, divided and traumatized for even more decades. And to this day, Belgium did not even issue a formal apology for anything, let alone paid reparations.
And with that, I think the question of why the Congo has difficulties performing amongst the best in global football has answered itself.
For Mexico Daily Post, Paul Schmidt-Troschke
Paul Schmidt-Troschke is a German independent journalist, currently based in northern Mexico, specializing in international sports and their relationship to politics and society. He is the co-host of the “World Cup etc” and “World Sports etc” podcasts, available across all podcast platforms.
