Offside in Rabat: How AFCON Laid Bare Africa's Hierarchies

AFCON, the Africa Cup of Nations held last December, has recently turned into a battlefield. It was meant to showcase Pan-African unity, but for Morocco, the host, it was also part of a broader strategy to cement its status as a diplomatic and sporting power ahead of co-hosting the 2030 World Cup with Spain.

On 18 January, a dramatic Moroccan penalty shot in the hosts’ final match against Senegal ignited a storm that continues to reverberate across North and Sub-Saharan Africa, fuelling debates about racism, corruption, and African sovereignty.

The Chaos

During stoppage time, with the score level, the hosts were awarded a penalty following a VAR review. In an unprecedented move, Senegal's head coach, Pape Thiaw, ordered his players off the pitch in protest. When the match resumed, tensions inside Rabat's Prince Moulay Abdellah Stadium boiled over as Senegalese fans attempted to storm the pitch.

Real Madrid star Brahim Díaz stood one penalty away from securing the 'Atlas Lions' their first AFCON title since 1976. Instead, he attempted a cheeky chip that was easily saved. Senegal stormed back in extra time to score the winner. 'It was as if God himself had intervened to defend the powerless, a proof that injustice does not last forever,'  Solomon Waliaula, Associate Professor of Literature at Maasai Mara University, told FairPlanet in a Zoom interview. 

The rage against Morocco had started even before the late penalty kick, when videos from the 'towel-gate' incident, in which Moroccan ball boys and player Achraf Hakimi attempted to snatch the towel of Senegal goalkeeper Édouard Mendy in heavy rain, quickly went viral. 

After the game, some interpreted the victory as proof of Senegalese juju, a set of West African spiritual practices believed to influence luck through mediators or protective objects, such as Mendy’s towel. AFCON’s chaotic, high-stakes atmosphere often fuels talks of juju and incidents of alleged use of magic, as observed by journalist Carl Anka in The Athletic.

Prof. Wycliffe W. Simiyu Njororai told FairPlanet in a Zoom interview that the practice of juju is often treated as an 'African secret' that must remain hidden to be effective, thus dressing rooms frequently become sites of both offensive and defensive magic in local football.

'It does not matter whether it really happened or not,' he says. 'The very fact that Senegal walked off to the dressing room, Brahim Díaz’s wait before taking the penalty, and his subsequent miss created a narrative vacuum that football fans filled with a juju-spiritual explanation.'

A Final That Unveiled a Rift

On both sides, old tensions between Black people and Arabs in Africa resurfaced after the match. One video captured host fans portraying black individuals as 'animals'. A Moroccan outlet, citing interviews with migrants in Senegal, described fans being chased with knives by locals after the game. A French columnist in Le Point alleged racially motivated attacks on shops owned by sub-Saharan Africans in Morocco during the final - claims later dismissed by police. Still, a 2023 report by Minority Rights Group International and Tamaynut found sub-Saharan migrants in Morocco are 'commonly targeted with physical violence,' within a broader climate of racist abuse and stereotyping, where complaints are rarely investigated.

'There is a constant sense that sub-Saharan Africa is trying to undermine Morocco, that there isn’t real unity,' Khen Elmaleh, a DJ and columnist on Moroccan affairs, told FairPlanet during a phone interview. On the other hand, she points out a sense of superiority among Moroccans toward black Africans, grounded in the social reality of black migrants in the country. 

From Border Control to On-Pitch Conflict

Since the 2010s, Morocco has become a 'forced destination' for West Africans trying to reach Europe through the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, or the fences around the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. Since 2023, deepened cooperation with European authorities has left more migrants trapped between Europe’s fortified borders and the lives they left behind. Over the past decade, the EU has channelled more than €2.3 billion into Moroccan 'migration management,' effectively turning a transit country into a gatekeeper. In 2023, 75,184 people were stopped in Morocco from entering Europe — up 6 per cent year-on-year.

Senegalese nationals, the largest sub-Saharan community in Morocco, can enter visa-free for 90 days, but many fall into irregular status, leaving them unable to work legally, access basic services, or return home without the shame of 'going back with nothing.' As they remain undocumented migrants in Morocco, Elmaleh argues, West Africans began taking roles at the very bottom of the social ladder: working as domestic helpers, in service jobs, and in some cases, even resorting to begging. 'Thus, what we had here is a stark reflection of the hierarchy that reproduces unequal power relations, as if Black Africans are positioned as servants to North Africans', she said during the phone interview.

Through the eyes of many West Africans in Morocco, Elmaleh adds, 'Moroccans enjoy closer ties with Europe and a stronger position both on the continent and internationally. All of this erupted during the final.' 

A Match Won Behind Closed Doors

African time, argued Kenyan scholar John Mbiti in his book African Religions and Philosophy, is a composition of events that 'has to be experienced to make sense or to become real.' The AFCON saga produced two contrasting realities: one lived on the pitch, and a boardroom decision was made behind closed doors.

After the Disciplinary Board rejected Morocco's appeal on 16 March, the Confederation of African Football (CAF) Appeal Board ruled that Senegal had forfeited the match, effectively awarding the title to Morocco based on a contested reading of Articles 82–84 of the AFCON regulations, which do not clearly address whether a brief walkout constitutes a refusal to play.

Shortly afterwards, Mbiti's insight seemed to come to life: Senegal paraded the trophy before its fans during a friendly at the Stade de France in Paris, wearing jerseys marked with ‘two stars - one for their 2021 AFCON title, the other for the contested 2025 tournament.’ As their appeal moves through the legal process, fans across sub-Saharan Africa continue to celebrate what they see as the 'lived' result.

'The match was decided electronically, through email, but for us, football is performed, it is physical,' argues Prof. Waliaula, reflecting on reactions in Kenya. 'We saw the goal, we saw the missed penalty; we were there. That is the evidence.'

A Crisis of Trust and Governance

At its inception, AFCON embodied a Pan-African ideal that contrasted sharply with today’s tensions. First held in Khartoum in 1957, amid the continent’s march toward self-rule, it was conceived as a challenge to European dominance in world football. That spirit was clear from the start: when South Africa’s white-controlled football association sought to send a racially segregated team, CAF refused and expelled it from AFCON’s first competition.

Today, critics increasingly argue that CAF has been overtaken by FIFA and capitalist interests and is unable to govern independently. In 2019, FIFA staged an unprecedented six-month intervention in CAF, appointing FIFA’s Secretary General, Fatma Samoura, as 'FIFA General Delegate for Africa' to oversee its entire management and governance, described by FIFA's former president, Sepp Blatter, as a 'neo-colonial' move. 

That criticism resurfaced in December 2025, after the announcement that AFCON, held every two years since 1968, would move to a four-year cycle aligned with the FIFA calendar, echoing long-standing European complaints, including from former Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp, about losing African players during the crucial winter months.

Africa's New Geography of Power

Morocco’s successful 2030 World Cup bid, after five failed attempts, was led by the Moroccan Fouzi Lekjaa, who embodies a rare concentration of power linking Moroccan state finance and global football governance: Lekjaa serves as Budget Minister under the Aziz Akhannouch government, heads the Moroccan Football Federation and the 2030 bid, is CAF’s first vice-president, and has sat on the FIFA Council since 2021.

This unique concentration of power became especially contentious after CAF’s March ruling. 'Morocco controls. Let's tell the truth,' said Abdoulaye Fall, president of Senegal's football federation, after the decision, while pointing to Lekjaa’s numerous positions. ESPN's Colin Udoh called the ruling 'the most disgraceful in the history of CAF.'

For Romain Molina, a French investigative journalist who has reported on CAF for years, the verdict was only a symptom of a deeper problem. At the end, he told FairPlanet in a Zoom interview, both Morocco and Senegal were victims of the same dysfunction. Olivier Safari, head of CAF's refereeing committee, admitted going down to the pitch during the stoppage of the AFCON final, telling the referee not to apply the rulebook and avoid abandoning the match; the Djiboutian overseer of CAF's legal bodies was dismissed two weeks before the appeal; the jury was then handpicked by administrators, including the president of the Tunisian football federation - a Morocco ally whom CAF president Patrice Motsepe himself later conceded should never have sat on it. 'CAF made a big mistake, and tried to correct it by making another mistake, and another,' he adds.

Even in Morocco, the vindication feels hollow. 'It's a bit pathetic,' says Elmaleh. 'The real joy of the moment was taken from us.' The body founded in Khartoum in 1957 as an instrument of Pan-African sovereignty has come to resemble, as the Senegalese outlet Seneweb put it this spring, a 'sub-prefecture of FIFA.'