Qualifications for the Men’s Basketball World Cup continued over the weekend, scheduled from 25 August to 10 September in Japan, Indonesia and the Philippines. Italy had already qualified and the most significant absence so far is that of Argentina. Pending the assignment of the last of the 32 available places (which will go to Belgium or Serbia), the qualifiers have decreed that the next World Cup will be the first ever for Latvia, Georgia, Cape Verde and South Sudan, the youngest country in the world and also one of the poorest.
The South Sudan men’s basketball team played its first game in July 2011, two days after independence from Sudan following a referendum held after a long civil war. In that first match, the South Sudanese national team lost by two points against the team that had won the Ugandan championship. In 2015 he didn’t even try to qualify for the African Basketball Championship and in 2017 (the year of his first official match against another national team) he tried without success, but got some victories
Meanwhile, between 2013 and 2020, a violent civil war was fought in the country between different ethnic groups and with the confrontation between President Salva Kiir Mayardit and his deputy Riek Machar. Between direct and indirect effects such as hunger and famine, it is estimated that the civil war has led to the death of at least 400,000 people, with over 4 million refugees out of a total population of just over 10 million.
Largely thanks to Manute Bol, a very tall basketball player who played for years in the NBA and originally from what is now South Sudan, basketball is quite a popular sport in the country. As told from the site of the Olympics, however, organizing a competitive team and finding players has long been difficult for the local movement. There was a lack, and largely continue to lack, at least adequate indoor sports halls or fields. Players of South Sudanese origin were also scattered around the world and, during the years of the civil war, often unable or uninterested in participating.
Things started to change in November 2019, when former player Luol Deng became president of the local association. Deng came from over a decade in the NBA, a championship in which from 2004 to 2019 he had scored over 13,000 points, most of them with the Chicago Bulls. Born in present-day South Sudan, Deng fled to Egypt as a child after his father, a parliamentarian in Sudan, was imprisoned following a coup. It was there that he started playing basketball and also thanks to his talents he was able to move with his family first to the United Kingdom and then to North America.
Luol Deng con i Lakers nel 2016 (AP Photo/Gus Ruelas)
Deng, who also has British nationality (and who participated with the United Kingdom national team in the 2012 London Olympics), has never played for South Sudan, but after his retirement he decided to take care of it. «Representing the United Kingdom was an honor for me» these in 2021 «but South Sudan was always present in my mind».
In a relatively less problematic political situation, and thanks to the resources and contacts he matured over time, Deng managed to structure South Sudanese basketball and to convince players, often already of other nationalities, to represent their country of origin. For a few months during 2020, and again for the last few World Cup qualifying matches, Deng also acted as the head coach of the men’s team.
In 2021 South Sudan participated in its first international tournament: the African Championships, which it only had access to because Algeria was unable to participate due to the pandemic. It was eliminated in the quarterfinals by Tunisia, the team that went on to win the tournament. Between 2022 and 2023 the team, now coached by Brooklyn Nets assistant coach Royal Ivey, won 11 of 12 games in its qualifying group for the World Cup: a group in which it qualified first, with important victories against Egypt, Senegal and Tunisia, three teams until recently considered decidedly better. Qualification came on February 24 thanks to a win against Senegal and in the country it was understandably so much celebrated.
(FIBA)
In the South Sudan men’s national team many players come from Australia, where they went as asylum seekers and where they play in the Australian Basketball League; others play in the United States, but in minor leagues compared to the NBA: this is the case of Nuni Omot, who was born in a refugee camp in Kenya and plays in the G League for one of the satellite teams of the New York Knicks.
Still others play in leagues around the world. So far they have not done so, but in view of the World Cup, other NBA players could also choose to play for the South Sudanese national team such as JT Thor of the Charlotte Hornets, Wenyen Gabriel of the Los Angeles Lakers and also Bol Bol, the 23-year-old son of Manute Bol, who since he played for the Orlando Magic last year.
Meanwhile, a couple of weeks ago, the South Sudanese women’s national basketball team won the first match in its history: a 54-40 against Rwanda.
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