The scouting vocabulary describing African defenders has not changed in twenty-five years.
Strong in the air. Good athlete. Aggressive in the tackle. These phrases appear in scouting reports of Senegalese, Ivorian, and Cameroonian centre-backs with such regularity that you could generate them automatically.
What you rarely see is reads the game intelligently. Or distributes well under pressure. Or organises the line. These phrases are reserved for European defenders, with occasional exceptions for South Americans.
The vocabulary shapes deployment. A player described as strong in the air gets used as a strong-in-the-air defender. He gets paired with a more technical partner. The more technical partner, almost always, is European or South American. The African defender becomes the physical specialist. He gets the easy ball-winning duels and not the build-up responsibility.
This is not because African defenders cannot do the build-up. It is because the language used to describe them has already decided what they cannot do before they arrive.
Watch Kalidou Koulibaly's full career. Watch him at Napoli. Watch him organise a back four. Watch him play out from the back. Watch the gap between the player on the pitch and the language used to describe the player in the press. The gap is consistent across his entire career.
The scouting vocabulary needs an audit. Until it gets one, careers will continue to be miscategorised, and the players will continue to do work that the press will continue to underrate.