Africa’s first Olympic event opens in a loss-making stadium

For some people, the best ideas come in the shower or just before going to bed.

For Senegal's former president Macky Sall – who governed the country between 2012 and 2024 – the idea for a new national stadium came over lunch with FIFA president Gianni Infantino during the 2018 World Cup in Russia, Sall himself has claimed.

The Abdoulaye Wade Stadium opened in February 2022: a 50,000-seat multi-purpose facility originally known as the Diamniadio Olympic Stadium, located roughly 30 kilometres outside the capital, Dakar. Getting there took less than four years.

Sall announced the plans for the stadium publicly in August 2018. Two months later, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded Dakar the Youth Olympic Games (YOG) – the first Olympic event ever held in Africa – later postponed from 2022 to 2026 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In February 2020, Sall led a ceremony to kick off the construction. The stadium was built by the Turkish company Summa and is operated by the Senegalese state-owned company SOGIP.

The estimated building cost was around 270 million USD, largely covered by loans to the Senegalese state from a pool of lenders led by Standard Chartered. The group included the German export finance bank AKA Ausfuhrkredit-Gesellschaft, France’s Société Générale, and Saudi National Bank. ICIEC, the insurance arm of the Islamic Development Bank, insured the loans against the risk of the state defaulting.

On 31 October 2026, the venue will host the YOG opening ceremony, followed by the archery competition from 6 to 10 November.

Senegal's debt crisis

It is not unusual for states to borrow money from private banks. But subsequent audits found that Senegal’s public debt and budget deficits during Sall’s administration were substantially higher than officially reported.

In September 2024, over five months after Sall left office, the new government of President Bassirou Diomaye Faye and then Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko presented the preliminary results of an audit of the public finances, concluding that both budget deficits and public debt had been understated.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Sall dismissed the accusations as false.

In February 2025, Senegal’s Court of Auditors confirmed the findings. For 2020, the year the stadium financing was signed, Sall’s government had reported a budget deficit – the gap between what the state spent and what it earned – of 6.4% of GDP. The court put it at 9.17%. The reported debt ratio was 63.06%; the court found 75.5%. And in March 2025, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reviewed the court’s report and confirmed that deficits and debt had been significantly underreported.

Following the revelations, credit rating agency Moody's downgraded Senegal four times, most recently in August 2026, when the rating was cut to Caa2, a level Moody's associates with very high credit risk.

Moody's is one of the three agencies that dominate the global market for credit ratings, and investors and lenders rely on its assessments to judge whether a country can repay its debts. Each downgrade typically makes it more expensive for the country to borrow.

Play the Game has not established whether the stadium loan was among the debts left out of the figures reported under Sall’s administration. We asked Senegal’s Ministry of Finance, the Court of Auditors, the IMF, ICIEC, Standard Chartered, and AKA whether it was. None had replied at the time of publication.

And that exact question may be difficult to answer from the outside, says Astrid Iversen, associate professor and researcher specialising in sovereign debt at the University of Oslo. “The IMF depends on states' own reporting of their debt. They are not detectives,” she says.

Iversen explains that there are no mandatory debt registers for states, and private lenders, banks included, have no obligation to disclose the loans they make.

“Sometimes loans are hidden deliberately. Other times the government simply has a very poor overview,” she says.

A stadium the Games did not require

The stadium in Diamniadio was never a requirement from the IOC for the Youth Olympic Games. The IOC told Play the Game that the decision to build the stadium was taken independently by the Government of Senegal before the Games were awarded, and that it was not part of Dakar's candidature. After the Games were postponed, the stadium was completed, and the organisers decided to use it for archery and the opening ceremony.

“As the stadium had already been built and was operational, it was treated as an existing venue under the Olympic Agenda 2020 principles,” the IOC says in a written reply.

In other words, the IOC regards a stadium built during the Games' preparation period as an existing venue in the IOC's sustainability framework.

In 2014, four years before Dakar was awarded the Games, the IOC had adopted the Olympic Agenda 2020, a sustainability reform that asks Olympic hosts – YOG included – to make maximum use of existing venues. The IOC's venue page for Dakar 2026 says exactly that has been done.

Yet the stadium was not included in the Games’ earlier plans. In the venue master plan from October 2021, the archery competition was placed at the existing Stade Iba-Mar-Diop in Dakar. The Abdoulaye Wade Stadium was not on the map, even though it would be inaugurated just four months later, well ahead of the Games.

By the November 2025 master plan, archery had been moved to the new stadium in Diamniadio.

The IOC did not answer Play the Game’s questions about whether risk or legacy assessments of Dakar's bid were carried out, nor what it did when it emerged that the Senegalese government had understated its debt.

Since its inauguration, the stadium has mainly been used by the men’s national football team, which has played around 15 matches there. In January 2025, the operator refused to rent it out for traditional wrestling, Senegal’s national sport, because of the risk of damage to the field. In October 2025, SOGIP's director general Dame Mbodji said that the stadium makes no money and runs at a loss, according to Senegalese news site Wiwsport. It is kept afloat by the company's other venues, Mbodji said.

Ordinary citizens pay the price

When hidden debt comes to light, the bill does not disappear. According to Astrid Iversen, it instead lands on ordinary citizens.

“It is very much the population that pays for debt crises,” she says.

Raising taxes is often a limited option, she explains, especially in poorer countries where the tax base is small. “The consequence of debt crises is, normally, cuts in public budgets that hit education, health services and the fight against poverty.”

Debt crises also tend to scare away foreign investors, she adds, which again deepens a country's economic problems and often leads to higher unemployment.

But not all the costs of hosting an Olympic event show up in debt statistics. Some have been shifted onto the local students who used to live where the athletes will sleep during the Games.

The Youth Olympic Village is located at Amadou Mahtar Mbow University, next to the stadium in Diamniadio. The campus has around 5,000 beds, and students living there were ordered to move out on 31 May 2026. On-campus teaching is suspended until January 2027, a disruption of approximately seven months because of a two-week event.

Computers and internet access promised so they could study remotely had not arrived by mid-May, and in spring Senegalese media reported that there were strikes and police on campus.

Play the Game has spoken to the president of the student collective at Amadou Mahtar Mbow University, Mouhamadou Diop. He explains that while computers and wi-fi modems have since been handed out, the students were moved out to live at home with their respective families.

“Since the entire remainder of the academic year is taking place online thanks to the equipment that was distributed, the costs of accommodation and living expenses are borne entirely by the students themselves and their families,” he says.

In the written reply to Play the Game, the IOC says the village is being delivered through renovations at the university, and that after the Games the facilities “will return to university use, providing students with improved accommodation and campus infrastructure that will remain as a lasting legacy.”

The Games close on 13 November. Students are scheduled to return to in-person teaching on 4 January 2027. The stadium will remain – classified by the IOC as an existing venue, although it was built during preparations for the Games.