In Cotonou, where the Atlantic carries memories as much as trade, Benin’s football ambitions are being shaped by more than new pitches and national-team fixtures. As the Cheetahs prepare to meet Argentina on Tuesday in what is expected to be Lionel Messi’s final international appearance, the country is pursuing a longer project: building an African football force with stronger local structures, diaspora links and a newly active connection with Brazil.
Benin has looked closely at Morocco’s rise without seeking to copy it outright. The aim is to develop a model suited to a smaller nation: modern facilities, more organised domestic clubs, youth development and a broader search for players with a meaningful relationship to the country. Brazilian football has become part of that effort, following a recent period of closer diplomatic, economic, military and cultural cooperation between the two nations.
About $400 million has been directed into football, including the construction of 24 stadiums across the country. Major Beninese businesses have also been encouraged to take charge of clubs, with the intention of establishing a more competitive league. The programme extends beyond the men’s senior side: Benin’s women reached the Under-20 World Cup, while the men’s team came close to reaching the most recent World Cup.
Henrique Souza, the former Flamengo and Fluminense defender who also spent many years in France, has been central to the Brazilian side of the plan. After accompanying a Beninese government delegation in Brazil in 2024, he was asked to serve as an international adviser across football and other sports. He helped arrange exchanges between Beninese officials and Brazilian clubs, while also identifying possible players abroad.
For Souza, the World Cup remains the horizon. Morocco offers proof that an African country can grow into a continental reference point, he said, though Benin must follow its own path rather than reproduce another nation’s system. The work with potential recruits, he added, is not only about whether a player can improve the team. It also involves explaining the history behind the connection and the role such a player could have as a representative of a wider Brazil-Benin relationship.
Two high-profile approaches did not lead further. Souza spoke to Palmeiras midfielder Marlon Freitas and invited him to visit Benin, while he also contacted the father of Olympique de Marseille forward Igor Paixão, who was born in a quilombola community in Amapá. Both players declined, retaining hope of one day representing Brazil.
Felipe Santos and an unfinished international case
The first Brazilian to take the journey was Felipe Santos, a 29-year-old forward from the interior of São Paulo who plays in Thailand and came through the youth systems of Palmeiras and Vasco da Gama. He had not expected the call, but the offer involved more than a place in a squad. Benin saw him as someone who could give a human face to its new outreach.
His first trip came in June 2025, around six months after the invitation. On landing in Cotonou with his wife, he was met on the aircraft by security officials and taken to his hotel. The visit included meetings with ministers and the president, as well as stops at historic sites. Santos found echoes of Brazil in the welcome he received, in the food and in the warmth of daily life.
“It is a country with a rich history, despite Africa’s difficulties,” Santos said. “The people reminded me of Brazil: welcoming, ready to help and happy even in hard circumstances. There are also foods and traditions that travelled from Benin to Brazil.”
A 2024 law made it easier for people of African descent around the world to seek Beninese nationality. Santos has since acquired citizenship, appeared in four friendly matches for Benin and scored once. His status does not yet allow him to play in official international competition, however.
FIFA published updated eligibility guidance on 10 September for players wishing to represent a country other than their birthplace. The standard routes include a biological parent or grandparent born in that territory, or five uninterrupted years of residence. Exceptional cases can also be considered by FIFA’s tribunal. Santos does not meet the family-birth criteria, so the Benin Football Federation has submitted a case based on research into his family background.
That petition remains under consideration, leaving him unavailable for Africa Cup of Nations qualifying matches. A possible role against Argentina was discussed because the game is a friendly, but Benin chose not to name him in the squad.
Football across an Atlantic history
The search for connection is inseparable from the history between Benin and Brazil. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, vast numbers of enslaved Africans were forcibly shipped from Ouidah to Brazilian ports, particularly towards the north and northeast. Their labour, knowledge, culture and traditions became fundamental to the making of Brazil, even as the violence of slavery and later historical erasure left many descendants without clear family records.
Historian and writer Ynaê Lopes dos Santos has stressed that the people taken from the region were crucial to Brazil’s material, cultural and symbolic formation. Recovering those ties, she argues, can illuminate African contributions that have often been obscured and can deepen Brazil’s engagement with the continent.
For Felipe Santos, the process has made that absence of records personal. He grew up with family accounts of ancestors arriving in Brazil under slavery. When Benin entered his life, he sat with his grandmother to ask what she knew. Her knowledge was limited: she had heard that her own grandparents had come to Brazil as enslaved people. Together, the family began to investigate further.
That is why Benin’s attempt to recruit abroad reaches beyond the usual international football calculation. It is still a sporting project, seeking better players and a future place at a World Cup. But from Cotonou to São Paulo, it is also opening a route back through a history that crossed the ocean under the most brutal conditions—and asking whether football can now provide a different kind of meeting point.
