Bolaty Kouadio Scored Ivory Coast World Cup Tickets. It took generations.
WORDS BY Brendan Dentino
PHOTOGRAPHY BY Andrew Zwarych
June 20 2026
PHILADELPHIA, Penn.
Bolaty Kouadio didn’t have a ticket, and he didn’t know how to get one. “There’s so much hearsay and rumors,” he said a week before the 2026 World Cup. The Ivory Coast men’s national soccer team last qualified for the tournament in 2014, when a 15-year-old Kouadio arrived in the United States from Ivory Coast, and he didn’t want to miss Les Éléphants’ opening match against Ecuador in Philadelphia. “The team needs our people.”
Ecuador fans far outnumbered their counterparts, both in the stadium and throughout the city, and the Ivorians in attendance were mostly clustered behind the team’s bench. All game they chanted and danced and cheered, a blip of orange in a sea of yellow, and their team reciprocated with a winner in the 90th minute. Kouadio was part of that spirited, Ivorian contingent. He had got his hands on a ticket. “There aren’t enough words to describe how I feel,” he said after the game.
I don’t know which aspect of Ivory Coast’s 1-0 win was most improbable. Ecuador were on a 19-game unbeaten streak dating back to September 2024, and before the match they stood ten places better than Ivory Coast in FIFA’s men’s world ranking. Not a single player for Ivory Coast had World Cup experience. In fact, Ivory Coast featured the youngest squad at the 2026 World Cup. Kouadio, for his part, couldn’t afford a ticket, which exceeded $1,000 on secondary markets as kickoff approached. He also had to survive civil war and build a life in a foreign country.
Ivory Coast was founded in 1960, but its youth belies a deep, complex history. Its region in West Africa was ruled for centuries by various kingdoms and empires organized along ethnic and religious lines. These peoples and their traditions and culture did not disappear when Europeans first arrived in the 15th century, and they didn’t when France etched out colonial borders in the 19th century. For decades, Ivorians of all backgrounds resisted French colonial rule until Ivory Coast won its independence. To Americans, it’s a relatively stable, if unfamiliar country.
Ivory Coast possessed no natural deep-water harbors, so unlike its regional neighbors it played only a minor role in the transatlantic slave trade, and the United States acted mostly as a bystander when Europe’s 19th-century powers scrambled to claim African land and people as their own. It wasn’t until after World War II when Ivory Coast attracted American investment and established diplomatic relations. Even then, Ivory Coast wasn’t party to the ideological battle of the Cold War.
“Ivory Coast’s Thirty Glorious Years, the country’s postwar economic boom that spanned the period of the 1950s to the early 1980s” Abou B. Bamba, professor of Africana studies at Gettysburg College, writes in his book African Miracle, African Mirage, “was a struggle among French development workers, American modernizers, and Ivorian enthusiasts for rapid social change.” These forces conspired to turn this small and new country on the geopolitical periphery into one of the world’s largest agricultural exporters.
The resulting prosperity tempered domestic politics under the authoritarian rule of president Félix Houphouët-Boigny. Outmigration was negligible, particularly to the U.S. Until the 2000s, the Ivorian-born population in the States officially numbered no more than a few thousand people. That started to change in 2002, when the first Ivorian civil war broke out.
It stemmed in part from the end of the Thirty Glorious Years. Global recessions in the 1980s significantly devalued Ivorian commodities, forcing the country to table many public works and contend with its mountain of debt. Political strife emerged, then it turned into political violence. I asked Kouadio if the civil war is why, in 2006, his father was the first in the family to leave Ivory Coast for the U.S. “Politics, religion—the war affected everything,” he said after a contemplative moment. “A lot of parents came for a better life.”
Another civil war broke out in 2011, when loyalists of two presidential candidates took up arms after a contested election. Kouadio was 12 years old. “We got caught in the gunfire,” he said, “but that’s a whole story,” one he declined to share. He did reflect on what it was like growing up in Abidjan, Ivory Coast’s biggest city and its economic engine. “Back home, you couldn’t dream. You just focused on what was in front of you. And [in the war] you just tried to survive and escape.”
He paused again, then added: “But there was joy, too.”
On June 8, the Ivory Coast men’s national team touched down in the U.S., and dignitaries in Wilmington, Delaware, where the team is staying during its World Cup run, feted the Ivorian delegation. Less formally, Ivorians walked alongside the team bus to the hotel. They welcomed the players into the lobby. They danced in the streets, and they filled Wilmington’s Rodney Square with inflatable elephants and Ivorian catering.
The party continued a few days later when the Ivory Coast team took on the Philadelphia Union’s developmental squad in a World Cup tune-up. The game was sold out, and it’s where I became acquainted with Kouadio, whose green bucket hat and Ivory Coast jersey served as his uniform during the tournament. In talking about the friendly, Kouadio had to correct me. The Ivorian fans at the game were not visitors, at least not from Ivory Coast.
Last year, the Trump administration instituted a policy that required Ivorians and other foreign nationals traveling to the U.S. for the World Cup to post bonds in the thousands of dollars per person. That December, many types of Ivorian visitors were barred from visiting altogether “to prevent national security and public safety threats from reaching our borders,” according to the White House. The State Department later waived the visitor bond requirements, though for Ivorians the waiver was applicable only to visitors who received travel approval prior to the White House’s December decree. Considering the legal complexity and political environment—to speak nothing of the cost of traveling and the price of tickets—it’s likely that very few, if any Ivorian nationals traveled to the U.S. for the tournament.
It’s not a stretch, then, to say that Ivory Coast national team events served as the epicenter of the Ivorian diaspora in the U.S., especially because the Ivorian-born population, now estimated at 100,000, is concentrated along the Northeast Corridor. Kouadio himself lives in Paterson, a city in northern New Jersey, so he was able to drive wherever the Ivory Coast team was appearing next. He didn’t bother asking anyone to join him at the friendly. He didn’t need to.
“We’re known for talking,” he said about Ivorians. “I knew there’d be brothers and sisters— cousins and friends, actually, but in Ivory Coast we call everyone our brothers and sisters—and I would just need to text them. It doesn’t take much for Ivorians to make fun.” If that’s true, then it’s reflected in the country’s soccer.
Nothing was more fun than playing as Chelsea in FIFA video games in the 2000s. Virtual Didier Drogba could score from the halfway line (although, the real version could probably do that, too). Yaya Touré put Manchester City on his back in the 2010s until Pep Guardiola arrived. The national team had a blast winning the 2023 African Cup of Nations on home soil. Kouadio once wanted to be one of those players.
After arriving in Paterson, he dove into sports, track and golf included, and was recruited by several colleges to play soccer. He was offered only partial scholarships, and his family in the States couldn’t afford the tuition balance. His father worked in warehouses then liquor distribution, and he was supporting the reunited Kouadio’s. Bolaty’s brother, two sisters, and mother had all immigrated by 2014.
Kouadio enrolled at Passaic County Community College, where he studied information technology, then mechanical engineering, but Covid pandemic derailed his soccer and educational plans. He pivoted to the U.S. military, where he serves as a combat engineer in the Army National Guard and works with explosives. Kouadio wants to finish his degree once he earns his education benefits. He also wants to become a firefighter and to teach. He’s already worked as a youth soccer coach.
His is an impressive résumé for any 27-year-old, let alone an immigrant who spoke no English upon his arrival to the States. But it seemed to me a résumé centered around service, not self. I asked him where that came from. “In Ivory Coast, we don’t have much,” he said, “but we share what we have.”
Wilfried Singo is a 25-year-old defender for Galatasaray. The Turkish super club brought in Singo from AS Monaco for a reported €30.8 million fee. It makes sense why he started at right centerback for the Ivory Coast national team. He is big and strong and fast and good at soccer.
A lesser known fact is that he is friends with a man named Dorgeles Coulibaily, another of Kouadio’s cousins. Coulibaily lives in Newark, New Jersey, now, but he played soccer with Singo in Ivory Coast when they were younger. Singo would go on to play at the upper echelon of world football and Coulibaily would immigrate to the U.S., but the two kept in touch and they greeted each other warmly when Coulibaily visited Singo in Wilmington. That greeting included Singo giving Coulibaily two tickets to the Ivory Coast-Ecuador game, for Singo couldn’t use his allotted tickets. His family remained in Ivory Coast. Coulibaily would take Kouadio to the game. They’d sit behind Ivory Coast’s dugout.
“At first, we lost hope,” Kouadio told me after the victory. “There were so many Ecuador fans. I didn’t see any Ivory Coast jerseys outside of our section.” Kouadio also thought he saw Ivory Coast coach Emerse Faé shake his head during the national anthems, apparently dispirited by Ecuador playing with such a huge advantage in the stands. After kickoff, Ecuador had an advantage on the field, too.
They dominated in the midfield and hit the woodwork twice. Ivory Coast was left to rely on spirited, if unsuccessful counterattacks led by 19-year-old winger Yan Diomande. He was, by far, the best player on the pitch. He ran past defenders. He passed the ball around defenders. Ecuador started double-teaming Diomande, and he’d split defenders. Ivory Coast’s gameplan was to block shots, take possession, and immediately get the ball to Diomande. It wasn’t a bad strategy. There’s a reason why he’s about to elicit a $100 million transfer fee from a top club. Still, Ivory Coast were lucky to go in at half even at 0-0.
The second half offered drudgery. Ivory Coast stopped being so passive, and Ecuador, refusing to let Diomande beat them, took the foot off the gas. This let Ivory Coast even up the possession percentage, but they didn’t do much with the ball. “We were yelling at Diomande to take chances,” Kouadio said. “We saw there was a weakness with Hincapié.” That’s Piero Hincapié, the poor Ecuadorian defender who was tasked with staying in front of Ivory Coast’s star. In the end, it wasn’t Diomande but Singo who made the difference in the game.
In the 90th minute, Singo received an outlet pass from his goalkeeper and made a skillful turn away from the man defending him. Looking up, he saw the entire right flank vacated by Ecuador, and he drove into that space. Like a horse in the stretch run, he entered Ecuador’s box with power and grace, then flicked a pass to midfielder Amad Diallo, who redirected the ball into the back of the net. Ivory Coast won a World Cup game for just the fourth time, and they ended Ecuador’s undefeated streak. They did it with one of the smallest supporter sections of the tournament. Kouadio insisted that the players could hear them and that they knew their voices. Maybe he’s right. “There weren’t a lot of people, but the cheers were loud and they pushed us until the end,” Diomande said after the game, referring to the Ivorians behind the bench.
On the way out, many Ecuador fans asked Ivory Coast fans for pictures, and some even swapped jerseys. When Kouadio and Coulibaily finally left the stadium they did the most American of acts. They sat in traffic. They didn’t care. “I’m not going to understand the moment until later on. I can soak it in later,” Kouadio said. “For now, it’s just a lot of joy.” —