Emerse Faé

Emerse Faé is the most unlikely World Cup head coach in Group E. A former Ivory Coast international midfielder with 26 caps and a club career at Nantes, Nice and Reading, he retired in 2015 and slid into a backroom role with the Ivorian federation, working with the U23s and then joining the senior team’s coaching staff in 2022. When Ivory Coast hosted the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations in January 2024, Faé was Jean-Louis Gasset’s assistant — not the man pencilled in for the top job.

Then everything broke. Ivory Coast lost 0-1 to Equatorial Guinea on home soil in the group stage, finished third in their group, and the federation sacked Gasset before the round of 16. Faé was handed the job for the knockout phase as an emergency caretaker — a role nobody envied. What followed is now a piece of African football folklore: Ivory Coast survived extra time and penalties against Senegal in the round of 16, beat Mali in extra time in the quarter-finals, beat DR Congo 1-0 in the semis, and overturned a 1-0 deficit to beat Nigeria 2-1 in the Abidjan final on February 11. Faé became the first coach in AFCON history to win the trophy without starting the tournament in charge.

The federation made him permanent ten days later. The follow-through has been steady: Ivory Coast topped CAF Group F in 2026 World Cup qualifying with 8 wins, 2 draws, and clean sheets in all 10 matches — the best defensive record in African qualifying. He was named CAF Coach of the Year 2024 and has earned the trust of a squad that knows he was a teammate to several of the older heads not long ago.

At 41 — fully 37 years younger than Curaçao’s Dick Advocaat and just three years older than Germany’s Nagelsmann — Faé represents a new generation of African head coaches who are products of the same dressing room they now lead. The brief for USA 2026 is to deliver Ivory Coast’s first ever knockout-stage appearance at a World Cup, and the defensive base from qualifying gives him a credible platform to do it.