The same passport that prevents a fan from attending a match prevents an artist from attending a biennale or a musician from performing at a festival. Sport and culture are consistently grouped together in government departments and policy frameworks yet neither has reckoned seriously with the visa system that makes the exchange it profits from structurally unequal.
The World Cup has made this imbalance impossible to ignore. African clubs generate just 1% of global football transfer fees whilst African applicants account for 40% of the entire global cost of Schengen visa rejections. Meanwhile, Right to Dream, a celebrated international development community that began as a single academy in Ghana, was established with an investment of $120 million to develop players who would go on to power some of the world’s top leagues. The global football economy has built sophisticated systems for financing the movement of talent and capital. The financing of movement for the people those systems produce and the communities they belong to has not received the same investment. Ironic?
That irony costs a lot. LAGO’s analysis of official European Commission data found that in 2025 applicants from African nations paid €63 million in non-refundable fees, turned away from a short visit to Europe.
Sixty-three million euros. It is the kind of number that lands but disappears quickly within a media landscape of endless headlines and breaking news. Large enough to sound significant but abstract enough to mean very little in everyday terms. This is a problem that data and design can help solve, by giving it a shape and by placing it next to something that has been crossing borders for a long time: the beautiful game of football.
Consider three numbers.
The Confederation of African Football (CAF), had a total annual budget of approximately €121 million in 2024-2025, covering tournaments, development and the administration of football across 54 nations. The cost of rejected visitor visas for African applicants in 2025 was more than half of that entire budget.
CAF’s football development expenditure in 2024-2025, the money invested in building the future of the game through women’s and youth competitions, referee training and grassroots investment, was approximately €36 million. The cost of rejected visitor visas for African applicants in 2025 was almost twice that figure.
In 2024, African clubs received approximately €97 million from selling players to foreign clubs. The cost of rejected visitor visas for African applicants in 2025 was equivalent to 65% of that figure. Almost two thirds.
This is what we mean by a question of scale. The money flowing out of the continent through rejected visa fees is not marginal. It sits alongside and against the money flowing into the development of one of the African continent’s most globally significant industries. These are not causal inferences or direct comparisons. We are not saying that the cost of visa rejections determines the CAF budget or even that it should be invested instead in football. What we want to highlight is the scale and the meaning of the cost of visa rejections, what applicants pay in non-refundable fees measured against the systems that govern how talent and capital move across the same borders.
This flaw in the system can be addressed by policy and design. AFCON 2027 is hosted in East Africa for the first time in over half a century; Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, three nations that have been among the most progressive on intra-continental mobility, will welcome 1.5 million fans under a tournament named “Pamoja”: together. The contrast with the European visa system that turns away nearly half of applicants from those same nations could not be more deliberate or more pointed.
Poet and politician Aimé Césaire wrote his Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, a reckoning with what Europe had taken from the continent and an assertion of the right to speak back. The data LAGO publishes each year is not a reckoning of that scale but it is an insistence on something similar: that the centre of the conversation about movement does not have to remain in Europe. That it can be held in Nairobi, in Dakar, in Kinshasa and in all the places where the cost of these systems is felt most acutely.
One of my favourite lines from Return to My Native Land is ‘We shall speak. We shall sing. We shall shout.’ This feels ever so fitting as I think about the next chapter of LAGO’s work on visa inequality. You see, The Beauty of Movement believes that data alone is not enough. That we need to perform and converse and create alongside it in order to show all sides of what movement makes possible and all sides of what its absence costs. This is how ‘All Other Passports’ will continue to come to life.
Footnotes
The total cost of visa rejections is calculated by multiplying the €90 application fee by the number of rejections. The €90 fee does not represent the full cost to applicants. A recent year-long investigation by Lighthouse Reports found that VFS Global, the private company that processes visa applications for governments, has built a profit model around additional charges on top of the standard fee.
Data visualisation by Independent Information Designer Federica Fragapane; analysis by Data Analyst Verdiana Pasqualini in collaboration with LAGO Collective.
Data sources: European Commission Schengen visa statistics / CAF 2024-2025 Budget (46th General Assembly, Addis Ababa) / FIFA Global Transfer Report 2024.
Cover image credit: Official match ball of FIFA 2026, World Soccor Shop.