Cup Results Show Two Africas

JOHANNESBURG—Ghana has gold, chocolate and a stable democracy. Now it also has a soccer team, backed by much of the African continent, playing in the quarterfinals of the World Cup.

Regional neighbor Nigeria has oil—and another scandal.

After Nigeria returned home with two losses and a tie in the World Cup, President Goodluck Jonathan suspended the team from international competition for two years. Presidential spokesman Ima Niboro on Wednesday also said the Nigeria Football Federation, which oversees the national team, was being investigated for corruption and misuse of funds.

The contrasting World Cup fortunes of the two soccer-loving nations, separated by the two wisp-thin countries Togo and Benin and sharing a common language, English, say a lot about the realities in each place.

Ghana has developed its soccer infrastructure in much the same way it has conducted transparent presidential elections and stable transfers of power. Nigeria, whose 140 million residents make it Africa's most populous country, often promises those things but rarely succeeds in delivering.

"Ghana does everything better than Nigeria" in terms of soccer, says Steve Bloomfield, author of the recent book "Africa United: Soccer, Passion, Politics and the First World Cup in Africa." "They seem far more interested in the overall well-being of football in their country rather than in their own bank balance."

Ghana, Mr. Bloomfield says, runs a better local league, a better soccer federation and enjoys less political interference than Nigeria. Ghana last year won the Under-20 soccer world championships. This year, it is the only surviving African team in the 2010 World Cup, and on Saturday defeated the U.S.—a country with more than 10 times its population.

When Ghana faces off against Uruguay on Friday in Johannesburg, it will be just the third African country to play in a World Cup quarterfinal. No African team has advanced to the semifinals.

Ghana's survival in the World Cup, the first hosted by an African country, has been accompanied by a surge in interest and support among other Africans.

Kwesi Myantakyi, the chairman of the Ghana Football Association, said his team's success was an opportunity to "redeem the image of Africa" after so much negative press about the continent and after the other five teams from the continent were knocked out. He acknowledged his team was now a flag-bearer for a continent.

"We will do our best not to disappoint you," he said Thursday.

Nigeria, by contrast, has become a model for how not to develop a soccer program, say critics. The failures have angered fans and officials alike, prompting the president to suspend the team, which advanced to the knockout round in 1994 and 1998, from international competition.

Nigeria has the most abundant oil reserves on the continent. But the country has squandered tens of billions of dollars in oil wealth over the past four decades, according to estimates by the government and human-rights groups.

Neither the Nigerian president's spokesman nor the Nigerian Football Federation responded to requests for comment.

Some see the same disarray in its soccer league. When FIFA, soccer's governing body, hosted the Under 17 world championships in Nigeria earlier this year, a lack of infrastructure prompted them to turn over daily operations to a security contractor, according to the people involved in the tournament.

"The Super Eagles disappointed every Nigerian, including Mr. President," said Rafiu Oladipo, the president of the Nigerian Football Supporters Union, by phone from Lagos. "We must use this opportunity to build a new team full of young boys, those who have commitment and discipline to work for Nigeria."

The Super Eagles, as the Nigerian team is known, were in disarray well before the World Cup started. Ghana has had the same coach, Serbian Milovan Rajevac, for the past 2½ years. Nigeria hired Swede Lars Lagerback three months before the World Cup.

Later, when it was discovered that the hotel the Super Eagles booked in South Africa was still under construction, the team had to pay $125,000 to cancel its reservation and rebook somewhere else. When they were ready to fly from their training facility in London to South Africa, their plane malfunctioned and they were delayed another day.

"Pretty much everything that could have gone wrong for them did go wrong," says Mr. Bloomfield. "Ghana's preparation for the past 2½ years has been very good, Nigeria's has been appalling."

—Peter Wonacott contributed to this article. Write to Will Connors at william.connors@wsj.com