Sudan's football team Al-Hilal competed in Tanzania's Vodacom Premier League in 2024 due to civil strife back home.
When Sudanese football was thriving, Kenyan striker Allan Wanga, and midfielder Teddy Akumu both had stints in the Sudan Premier League.
Between 2014 and 2015, Wanga who is now 39, featured for Sudanese giants Al Merreikh SC, one Africa’s oldest clubs which was established in 1908. Al Merreikh SC are based in Omdurman, 10 kilometres north west of the capital Khartoum.
In the same period, 33-year-old Akumu who now plays for Lebanese Premier League side Nejmeh Sporting Club, played for Al Khartoum.
Kenyan football fans remember August 24, 2014, when Wanga scored the winning goal in the final of Cecafa Club Championships held at Amahoro Stadium in Kigali, and helped his team Al-Merreikh beat APR FC 1-0 in the final to win the tournament.
In 2014, Al-Merreikh went to Kigali in search of regional football glory but this year, the Sudanese giants have taken refuge in Kigali, hoping to stay alive as civil war rages back home.
Sudan's football team Al-Hilal competed in Tanzania's Vodacom Premier League in 2024 due to civil strife back home.
When war exploded in Sudan in April 2023, football like every other sector of public life, collapsed overnight. Stadiums became ghost fields. Training camps emptied. Football, the country’s most powerful sporting symbol became another casualty in a war that has turned cities into rubble and transformed millions of citizens into refugees.
As the battle intensified and frontlines shifted, Sudan’s top clubs were forced to make decisions no sporting board in Africa ever expected to make: pack their jerseys, coaches, kits, physiotherapy equipment, and leave the country not as champions traveling for continental glory the way Al-Merreikh did on August 24, 2014, but as displaced institutions searching for survival.
Today, Sudanese football lives in exile. Clubs are registering in neighbouring countries, borrowing stadiums, renting training fields, renegotiating temporary host league approvals, and trying to maintain competitive continuity on foreign soil.
This is more than a sports adaptation. It is a dramatic rewriting of Sudan’s sports history, a forced relocation of national sports identity outside national borders because the homeland itself is no longer a functioning space for organized sport.
Al Hilal and Al Merreikh, the two largest clubs in Sudan, are now competing in the Rwanda Premier League this season, and it is not just a technical football headline. It is a profound indicator that sport is now travelling with the displaced Sudanese nation itself. Last year, Al Hilal competed in Tazania’s Vodacom Premier League.
War destroyed the entire sports ecosystem. Football in Sudan is not a luxury entertainment segment. It is an economic sector attached to media, sponsorship, sports commerce, jobs, and a chain of informal labour around stadiums on match days.
War and uncertainty
When the war destroyed the national league, it also destroyed the entire value chain associated with it. Major broadcasters halted contracts. Sponsorship streams vanished. Clubs lost commercial rights, merchandising channels, gate revenue, training academies, and junior development structures.
Thousands of individuals who depended on football as a direct or indirect economic ecosystem lost their livelihoods. Sudan’s sports economy was one of the few industries with potential to scale into modern, self-generating sustainability beyond the state. The war violently interrupted that trajectory.
One of the least discussed losses is the junior and academy generation. Sudan had begun building a new pipeline of youth talent for export to Gulf clubs, North African clubs, and organising trials for players in European leagues. This pipeline died the moment the league died.
Young players today are not only displaced from training grounds, but they are also displaced from the future. Many cannot even get reference statistics or match records required for scouting evaluations. Their talent development timeline stopped.
Their route to the professional dream froze. This is a silent generational injury that will be felt long after the guns stop firing.
In every war, people search for fragments of normality. For Sudanese communities today, football remains one of the rare surviving emotional bridges to “before the war.”
The 25,000-seater Kadugli Stadium in Kadugli, South Gordofan State is home to Al Hilal.
When a Sudanese fan watches their displaced club playing in Rwanda as Al Hilal and Al Merrikh are doing , or in Mauritania as Al- Merrikh did last season, or elsewhere today, or by streaming on mobile phone through weak internet connection, they are not watching just a match.
They are watching evidence that the Sudanese spirit still exists somewhere, somehow, even if outside Sudan’s own soil. A displaced football club becomes an emotional anchor for a displaced nation.
A player recently told me: “I left Sudan as a footballer… and suddenly became a refugee carrying my boots in a plastic bag.”
His story is not unique. Entire teams, entire staff groups, travelled as refugees. They lost their homes, their neighbourhoods, their sense of place but they carried their football kits as the only remaining symbol of identity that still belonged to them.
There have been wars in African football history before. Stadiums have closed temporarily before. But what is happening today to Sudanese football is different in scale, geography, and permanence.
This is not a temporary relocation for three matches or one season. This is a structural displacement. Sudanese football is entering a second consecutive season outside Sudan. When the state fails, and when war fragments geography, the sport is forced to build a parallel existence outside the country not for competitive advantage but simply to remain alive.
Auwal Shaibo of Al Hilal Shandi contests for the ball with Kyeyune Said of URA during a Cecafa Kagame Club Championship match in Kadugli, South Kordofan on June 18 2013.
This is historically new in African football: a national league fundamentally replaced by temporary foreign league participation because the physical homeland itself became unplayable.
The most difficult question now is not where clubs will play next season. The real question is: when will Sudan have a country stable enough for football to return to it? Even if the war stops tomorrow rebuilding stadiums, rebuilding youth systems, rebuilding the economic ecosystem of sponsorship and media rights will take years.
The war did not only destroy physical infrastructure. It destroyed the continuity chain required for retention of competitive standards, player development, and financial sustainability. The tragedy is not only that Sudanese clubs were displaced.
The tragedy is that football, which was one of the last collective safe national spaces, lost its home field. In Sudan, football was not just a sport. It was the nation’s public square, its emotional parliament, its mass memory archive. Today that memory archive is stored outside Sudan.
This is what makes the story much bigger than sport. It is a story about a nation whose identity now travels through its football clubs across foreign stadiums, until Sudan itself becomes a place where life and sport can return again.
Sudanese football did not choose exile. Exile was forced upon it. But in that forced exile, football is still carrying the last remaining organised symbol of Sudanese unity and until peace returns, Sudanese football will continue representing Sudan outside its borders, as an entire nation waits to reclaim its home field.
National team is thriving
Despite the challenges imposed by the war, Sudan’s national football team managed to qualify for the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations which will be held in Morocco from next month. Sudan also reached the semi-finals of the 2025 African Nations Championships which was co-hosted by Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania from August 2-30, 2025.
Al-Hilal continued its brilliance in the CAF Champions League, reaching the group stage.
Additionally, the Sudanese national team competed in the 2026 World Cup qualifiers, but it came with significant challenge of playing all the matches away from home.
The suspension of sports activities in Sudan due to the war has led to the migration of about 40 Sudanese players to the Libyan league at various levels. The Libyan Football Association took advantage of the new decision in January 2023, allowing clubs to sign Sudanese players as locals, providing these players an opportunity to remain active in sports.
Sudanese youth have also shown great resilience in facing the difficult conditions, with many local athletes organizing small sports events in camps and safe areas to maintain their physical activity and encourage future generations to hold onto sports as a means to improve their mental and social well-being during the crisis.
When the war ends, Sudan will face significant challenges in rebuilding infrastructure, especially after the destruction of sports facilities.
