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In April 1958, weeks before the World Cup, Algerian professionals in the French league, including Saint-Étienne's Rachid Mekhloufi and Monaco's Mustapha Zitouni, who was expected to play for France, secretly left their clubs to form a team for the Front de Libération Nationale. The squad toured friendly nations as a sporting embassy of a state that did not yet exist.
Leaders such as Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko funded, named and staged their national sides as symbols of the new nation and of their own regimes. That made players agents of the state. Victory became propaganda, and defeat became a political liability that could bring punishment, as the Zaire squad feared after its heavy losses at the 1974 World Cup.
FIFA offered Africa, Asia and Oceania a single qualifying slot between them for the 1966 World Cup, so the African federations, with Ghana's Ohene Djan prominent, withdrew en masse. The collective boycott forced FIFA to guarantee Africa its own place from 1970, which Morocco took. Africa's World Cup access was won by federations acting together, not granted on merit.
Read the careers of players like Mozambique's Eusébio, who starred for Portugal, and the Algerians in the French league as one continuous export route. In that route, colonial ties decided which European league absorbed African talent and which national flag it played under. Independence changed the flags, but the flow of the best players toward the former metropole largely continued.