Exclusive: “Beyond the Stadium: How Africa Can Turn Sport Into a US$20 Billion Industrial Opportunity”

Africa’s sports economy could become a US$20 billion industry by 2035—but unlocking that potential will require far more than building bigger stadiums. In this exclusive interview, Paulo J. Cruz, Founding CEO of African Collaborations Group (ACG) explains why Africa needs integrated sports and entertainment districts that generate revenue 365 days a year, attract institutional investment, create thousands of permanent jobs and turn sport into a genuine engine of industrialisation.

TOP AFRICA NEWS: From your experience across infrastructure, industrial parks, housing and large-scale real estate, what convinced you that sport can become a serious driver of Africa’s industrialisation rather than simply an entertainment sector?

Twenty-eight years of originating infrastructure projects across Africa taught me one thing: the sectors that industrialise are the ones that build ecosystems, not isolated assets. Industrial parks work because they cluster manufacturing, logistics, housing, and services in one place. Power projects work when they connect to transmission, distribution, and end users. Sport in Africa has not yet made that transition. It remains a sector of standalone stadiums, built for a single event, disconnected from the economy around them.

What convinced me was seeing the numbers. Africa’s sport economy is projected to reach USD 20 billion by 2035. The continent has 1.5 billion people and the youngest population in the world. The demand is enormous. But there is no infrastructure to capture it. That is not a sport or an entertainment problem. That is an industrialisation problem. The same logic I applied to industrial parks, housing programmes, and power projects applies here: build the ecosystem, connect it to the economy, make it financially self-sustaining, and the sector industrialises. That is what ACG does.

TOP AFRICA NEWS: You have said that “infrastructure is the prerequisite for the industrialisation of sport in Africa.” What, in your view, is the biggest infrastructure gap currently preventing African countries from fully developing their sports economies?

The gap is not the absence of stadiums. Africa has stadiums. What it does not have is sport infrastructure that works as an economic asset. The continent has invested billions in standalone, football-only stadiums that are used between 5 to 25 days a year and sit empty for the remaining time. They drain public budgets instead of generating revenue. They create no permanent employment beyond matchdays. They deliver none of the economic impact their proponents promised.

The biggest gap is the absence of integrated sport and entertainment districts: masterplanned, mixed-use ecosystems that combine stadiums, indoor arenas, aquatics centres, sport training academies, sports science facilities, schools, fitness centres, hotels, conference and exhibition centres, retail, cinemas, restaurants, nightlife, residential, commercial offices, public spaces and parks, transport infrastructure, and media production and broadcast facilities within a single development, designed to operate and generate diversified revenue 365 days a year. To give you a sense of scale, one of ACG’s most advanced projects covers 236 hectares. That is the infrastructure Africa is missing. Not more stadiums. Integrated ecosystems build according to international sports federations and entertainment standards, operating the whole year through.

TOP AFRICA NEWS: ACG is proposing to move beyond the traditional model of building a stadium for occasional events. What makes a “Victory District” financially sustainable throughout the year, and what revenue streams do you believe can realistically support such a district in an African market?

A Victory District™ is financially sustainable because it does not depend on any single revenue stream. A standalone stadium depends on matchdays. When there is no match, there is no revenue. A Victory District™ generates revenue from 15 to 20 different asset types simultaneously: stadiums and indoor arenas hosting competitions, concerts, and events, aquatics centres serving both elite sport and public use, sport training academies and sports science facilities generating tuition and programme fees, schools serving the surrounding community, fitness centres operating on membership models, hotels hosting visitors year-round, conference and exhibition centres attracting business events, retail serving daily foot traffic, cinemas and restaurants and nightlife venues drawing evening and weekend audiences, residential and commercial office tenants paying rent, media production and broadcast facilities licensing content, transport infrastructure connecting the district to the city, public spaces and parks activating community life, and naming rights, sponsorship, and brand partnerships generating commercial revenue across the entire district.

The financial logic is diversification. No single asset needs to carry the district. When the stadium is empty, the hotels are full. When there is no conference, there is a concert. When there is no concert, the training academies, the restaurants, the gyms, and the commercial tenants are operating. Revenue flows every day from multiple sources. That is what makes the model bankable, and that is what makes it fundamentally different from anything that has been attempted on the continent before.

TOP AFRICA NEWS: One of the biggest challenges with large infrastructure projects in Africa is moving from an attractive concept to a project that banks and institutional investors are actually willing to finance. What are the critical steps ACG takes to turn a sports concept into a bankable project?

ACG is an early stage investor, focusing on the pre-development phase: the feasibility, structuring, and institutional groundwork required to model a project from concept to bankability. Our sole purpose is to transform concepts into structured, masterplanned, bankable, and investable projects that are ready to receive institutional capital from our institutional investment partners to co-invest alongside ACG to execute construction and final delivery.

Our origination process is rigorous and sequential: from government mandate and site selection, through feasibility and masterplanning stress-tested by our Research & Impact Advisory Panel, to financial structuring and investment readiness. At every stage, the project must meet the standards that development finance institutions require. Our institutional investors do not invest in concepts. They invest in projects that have been originated to their standards. ACG fills precisely that gap: we create the pipeline of bankable sport infrastructure projects that Africa needs and that institutional investors have not yet had access to.

TOP AFRICA NEWS: Governments often see major sports infrastructure as a national prestige project, while investors need commercial returns. How do you intend to reconcile these two interests when ACG sits between governments, DFIs, private investors and sports organisations?

There is no contradiction. A Victory District™ that generates revenue, creates thousands of permanent jobs, attracts international events, develops local talent, and transforms an urban precinct is both a source of national pride and a commercially viable investment. The prestige and the returns come from the same place: a district that works.

The problem arises when governments build prestige projects that have no revenue model. A 60,000-seat stadium built for a single tournament is prestige without sustainability. A Victory District™ is prestige with sustainability. ACG’s role is to demonstrate to governments that the most prestigious outcome is not the biggest stadium, but the district that is still generating revenue, jobs, and international visibility and viability 20 years after it opens. That is the conversation we have with every government we engage with.

TOP AFRICA NEWS: Your career has included projects in several African countries, including industrial and urban development. What have those experiences taught you about the difference between designing a project for Africa and designing a project that is genuinely appropriate for a particular African community and market?

The difference is between exporting a model and originating one. In my years at Damac and LandAfrique, I saw what happens when projects are designed in an office in London or Dubai and transplanted to an African city without understanding the local market, the local economy, the local culture, or the local regulatory environment. They fail. Or they survive but never deliver the impact they promised.

Originating a project that is genuinely appropriate means starting from the ground: what does this city need? What does its economy produce? What are the existing transport and utilies infrastructures? What sports does this community play? What events can this market sustain? What is the hospitality demand? What are the regulatory requirements? What does the labour market look like?

That is why our Research & Impact Advisory Panel includes scholars from Africa, Europe, the United States, and Australia who bring different perspectives. And that is why every Victory District™ is calibrated to its specific market. A district in West Africa will look different from one in Southern Africa or East Africa, because the communities they serve are different. The framework is consistent. The content is local.

TOP AFRICA NEWS: ACG places strong emphasis on youth employment and talent development. Beyond the construction jobs created during a project, what permanent economic opportunities should young Africans realistically expect from a successful sport and entertainment district?

Construction jobs are temporary. They matter, but they end. What a Victory District™ creates is a permanent circular urban economy. The permanent jobs come from operations: hotel staff, restaurant workers, retail employees, security personnel, facility managers, event coordinators, sports coaches, physiotherapists, sports scientists, broadcast technicians, media producers, groundskeepers, maintenance teams, conference organisers, fitness instructors, administrators, and commercial office tenants who employ their own teams.

Beyond direct employment, there is the talent development pathway. A Victory District™ includes sport training academies, sports science facilities and vocational training institutes. For a young African athlete, that is the difference between training on a dirt pitch and training in a professional environment with professional coaching. For a young person who is not an athlete, the district offers career pathways in hospitality, event management, sports marketing, broadcast production, facility management, and dozens of other professions that barely exist as career options in most African cities today because the infrastructure to support them does not exist.

A single Victory District™ can create several thousand permanent jobs. Across a portfolio of districts, the employment impact is transformative.

TOP AFRICA NEWS: Large infrastructure projects can sometimes leave governments with expensive facilities that are difficult to maintain after construction. What safeguards would ACG put in place from the beginning to ensure that its projects do not eventually become a financial burden on taxpayers?

This is the most important question in sport infrastructure, and it is the question that the traditional model has consistently failed to answer. ACG’s entire model is designed around it.

The first safeguard is the revenue model itself. A Victory District™ is not designed to depend on government funding for operations. It generates its own revenue from 15 to 20 asset types. If the district cannot demonstrate financial self-sustainability in the feasibility study, it does not proceed to development.

The second safeguard is the operating model. From inception, every district is designed with a professional operator in mind. The operations and maintenance plan is part of the origination process, not an afterthought. We structure long-term management contracts that ensure professional operation for the life of the concession.

The third safeguard is the capital structure. ACG’s projects are financed through our institutional partners under project finance structures. The government does not borrow. The government does not guarantee the debt. If the project underperforms, the risk sits with the investors and the lenders, not with the taxpayer.

The fourth safeguard is independent academic scrutiny. Our Research & Impact Advisory Panel stress-tests the assumptions, validates the impact framework, and provides the evidence base that our institutional financiers require. If the economics do not hold up under independent review, the project does not move forward.

TOP AFRICA NEWS: You are building ACG as a pan-African platform rather than pursuing a single flagship development. Looking five to ten years ahead, what would success look like for you, and what would have to change in Africa’s sports economy for you to say that the model has truly worked?

Success looks like this: multiple Victory District™ projects operating across the continent, each generating revenue 365 days a year, each employing thousands of people permanently, each hosting African and international competitions, each developing local talent through professional training facilities, and each demonstrating to governments and investors that sport infrastructure in Africa can be a financially self-sustaining economic asset rather than a public cost.

Africa’s sport economy is projected to reach USD 20 billion by 2035. That potential will remain theoretical without the infrastructure to unlock it. Success means ACG has created that infrastructure. It means we have built the conditions for what Nicolas Pompigne-Mognard, ACG’s Founder, calls the industrialisation of sport in Africa: the moment sport stops being treated as a cost to the public purse and starts functioning as an economic sector in its own right.

For the model to have truly worked, three things would need to have changed. First, no African government should ever again build a standalone stadium with public money and no revenue model. The Victory District™ should be the standard, not the exception. Second, financial institutions should be actively competing to finance sport and entertainment districts in Africa, because the track record proves they are bankable. Third, young Africans in these districts should have career pathways in sport, entertainment, hospitality, media and many other sectors that did not exist before the districts were built.

If, in ten years, an African city has a Victory District™ where a young person can train as an athlete in the morning to become the next Kylian Mbappé, study in the afternoon to become the next Dr. Neill de Grasse Tyson, and attend a world-class Burna Boy concert in the evening, all within the same district, and that district is paying for itself, then the model has worked. That is what I am here to originate.

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