As part of our Language of Soccer World Cup series, The Athletic is speaking to supporters of all 48 nations competing at the 2026 edition to capture their unique football culture, distilled into a single phrase. You can read the articles in one place here.Bafana Kaofela – We are all Bafana BafanaWhen South Africa played their second-to-last warm-up game for the 2026 World Cup on home soil, more than 55,000 people turned up.Bafana Bafana would lose 2-1 to Panama in Cape Town but Mbekezeli Mbokazi’s equaliser gave an indication of how the country reacts to a spectacular moment on a football pitch.The central defender’s 30-yard strike zoomed into the top corner and, during the celebrations at the corner flag, his team-mates toppled over him. Meanwhile, the noise that followed seemed to cascade from the terraces.Despite the defeat, supporter Emilio Hartogh says the scenes show that South Africans are believing in their team again. “And love them,” he insists. “The country is obsessed by sports and the people who represent them. But we need something tangible to get behind. When that happens we say, ‘Bafana kaofela,’ which means, ‘We are all Bafana Bafana (the boys, the boys)’.”Not so long ago, it did not feel this way.“There was a friendly match in Durban ahead of the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) in 2023 and only a few hundred people were there,” says Norika Naidoo, who was one of the attendees. “The game was played in the middle of a storm, but it wasn’t just the torrential rain that put supporters off.”South Africa had failed to reach three of the six AFCONs since hosting the World Cup in 2010, which marked their last appearance in that tournament as well. “A degree of apathy had set in across the country as far as the national soccer team was concerned,” says Naidoo, who points towards goalkeeper and captain Ronwen Williams pleading for fans to attend matches as evidence of this. “Hosting the World Cup was a wonderful experience in terms of the vibes it created, but it was followed by many years of underachievement in terms of results on the pitch.”In 2010, South Africa hosted the first African World Cup (Alexander Joe/AFP via Getty Images)Hartogh and Naidoo agree that the mood slowly started to turn in 2019 when Bafana Bafana (a nickname that translates from Zulu) surprised Mohamed Salah’s Egypt by knocking the hosts out of AFCON. “My parents had gone to bed that night and I woke them up celebrating,” remembers Naidoo.Though South Africa lost in the quarter-finals to Nigeria, the team were getting better. The appointment of AFCON-winning Belgian coach Hugo Broos in 2021 seemed to increase the possibilities. His arrival after success with Cameroon coincided with a boom in interest in the domestic game.