AFCON, globalization, the image, and the footballer in his solitude

Rabat, 18 January 2026. The moment the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) final between Morocco and Senegal began to seize up, an old reflex reasserted itself: to pin the conflagration on “Africa”, as though the turmoil sprang from some supposed predisposition to disorder, from a collective emotion reputed to be ungovernable. This culturalist reading (and often a racist one) possesses formidable efficiency. It spares us the trouble of looking closely. Yet the Rabat final points to a reality that is both deeply contemporary and broadly universal. AFCON is now played at the intersection of elite sport, a global entertainment market, refereeing technologies, and political considerations tied to host states. The tensions of that evening say nothing about an “African temperament.” They illuminate a tournament that has become, all at once, a showcase, a sporting and institutional laboratory, and a continuous test of credibility.

The sequence struck observers by both its layered character and its dramatic escalation. A goal disallowed for Senegal, then a penalty awarded to Morocco after intervention by video assistant refereeing (VAR); the immediate protest and the withdrawal of Senegalese players, called by their coach, for nearly a quarter of an hour; scuffles between supporters, ball boys, and security forces in one corner of the stadium; a mediation that made it possible to resume play (in violation of the regulations that follow withdrawals); then the Panenka[1] attempted by Brahim Díaz and saved by Edouard Mendy; and finally, in extra time, a fabulous goal by Pape Gueye sealing Senegal’s victory (1–0). In a matter of minutes, the final slipped into a scene in which, in the same breath, footballing action, the authority of refereeing, collective trust, and the sovereignty of the image were all at stake.

What unfolded in Rabat thus exceeds the framework of an “incident” in an intense final. An institutional self-evidence was put to the test. A competition holds because it rests on a tacit agreement—and when that foundation begins to crack, the match becomes a negotiation in the open. AFCON today, like any major tournament, exists under such exposure that it struggles to withstand this kind of drift. And the crisis accelerates at the speed of images: each camera angle becomes an argument, each slow-motion replay turns into an exhibit, and each comment sets a competing narrative in motion. From this perspective, VAR must be understood as a full-fledged actor. The technology promises surer justice and more substantiated decisions. It also transforms the time of judgment, introducing waiting, review, and at times hesitation. What once belonged to the referee’s instantaneous gesture becomes a public procedure. One no longer merely “learns” the decision—one watches it being “made.” And because the image offers itself as certainty, everyone feels entitled to decide. VAR thus heightens expectations and makes frustration more brutal. It does not dissolve contestation; it displaces it onto a more technical, more argued terrain—one that is, in principle, more decisive. The Rabat final offered a clear illustration of this: the search for visual proof sometimes opens up a field of interpretation wider than that of ordinary doubt. 

The event, however, would be poorly understood if it were reduced to refereeing alone. The clashes in the stadium recalled another dimension. AFCON is a mass apparatus, and every mass apparatus presupposes precise management of flows, distances, and interactions among crowds, staff, and security forces. A crowd rarely calms down or flares up by “magic[2].” It reacts to perceptions of injustice, to rumors, and to movements of panic or hostility. In a match as charged and consequential as this one, the slightest friction becomes a message. When players leave the field in protest, the stadium is suspended on a question of authority. That suspension quickly translates into agitation, especially in an era in which the stands are connected, in real time, to social networks, media outlets, comment loops, and videos circulating on phones faster than official versions.

From a history of emancipation to a globalized institution

AFCON, at heart, has always exceeded the logic of a mere tournament. It was born in 1957, with the creation of the Confederation of African Football (CAF), at the moment when Africa was entering—by waves—into emancipation from European colonialism and into the construction of continental institutions. The first edition, in Khartoum, Sudan, was modest in format and immense in significance. Apartheid South Africa was excluded; Nasser’s Egypt won the trophy; and the event established a political language of communication—flag, anthem, pride, and fraternity—at a time when national independences were seeking their signs. Since then, this founding dimension has been continuously reconfigured: through the expansion of the tournament in the 1960s, the professionalization of federations, the globalization of player movement, the rise of media power from the 1980s onward, and finally the insertion of African football into an economy in which rights, calendars, and audiences now structure an entire ecosystem.

These transformations have placed AFCON within a regime governed by visibility. Hosting a tournament no longer consists merely in offering a popular celebration. It is about demonstrating an ability to organize, to referee, to produce images, and to attract audiences beyond the continent. The calendar, for its part, reflects power relations. AFCON was long associated with January–February, then underwent shifts, including the 2019 edition in Egypt, held in June–July and expanded from 16 to 24 teams. These oscillations reflect an ongoing negotiation with European leagues and player availability, which has become central as dozens of African footballers play for Europe’s biggest clubs. The Moroccan edition, organized from 21 December 2025 to 18 January 2026, follows the same logic of adjustment: preserving player participation, reducing friction with club competitions, and maximizing the audience (and revenues), all the more so since it comes six months before the World Cup to be played in North America (under the patronage of Donald Trump)!

Morocco also represents, in this latest cycle, an exceptional case. Its AFCON forms part of a trajectory of diplomacy and ambition directed toward the next World Cup, where Moroccans will try to confirm the excellent level that enabled them to reach fourth place at the 2022 World Cup (held in November and December in Qatar). It is also part of the march toward 2030, when they will co-host the World Cup with Spain and Portugal, within a singular architecture that includes three matches in South America[3].

AFCON has thus taken the form of a full dress rehearsal, whose event strategy aims to create an impression of control, openness, fluidity, and capability.

Yet the showcase has its reverse side. It throws internal debates about public priorities into sharp relief. The slogans of several Moroccan demonstrations over the course of 2025 pitted “hospitals” and “schools” against “stadiums”. They imposed an intensely political budgetary language—the hierarchy of urgencies and the justification of expenditure. The state highlights the spillover effects, infrastructure modernization, and the 2030 horizon. Social demands bring things back to the present: priorities, service quality, access to care, and education. Two temporalities—promise and everyday life—intersect and collide. AFCON does not create the tension, but it casts it into relief.

The footballer’s solitude

Against this backdrop, the Rabat final—its scenes and its outcome—consequently reinserted politics into the frame. Hence, after the match, the eruption of registers that far exceed sport: congratulations and condemnations of certain excesses, announcements of procedures, appeals to preserve African fraternity, efforts to close the crisis and prevent it from fracturing the shared symbolic space carried by the competition, and reminders of the promises of the near future.

And yet, amid institutions, markets, images, expectations, and quarrels, one detail retains an incomparable human density: Brahim Díaz’s penalty. A Panenka, as an attempt to stare anxiety down by transfiguring it into elegance. When it is saved, football reveals its most intimate and most cruel share—the instant when an individual, under the gaze of tens of thousands of people and hundreds of millions of viewers, sees his desire for mastery turn against him. The sadness then is not only that of a match tipping over, nor even that of a lost final celebration. It is that of a man caught in an image that escapes him, immediately slowed down, replayed, commented upon, mocked, imitated, and remembered.

In the contemporary economy of spectacle, error becomes an archive. And this is how football, at the very heart of major maneuvers of marketing and money, retains a tragic dimension in the most direct and most individual sense: exposed fragility, the solitude of a gesture, tears, and a life that shifts in a matter of seconds…

Ziad Majed

Originally published in French in AOC magazine

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[1] A chipped penalty struck straight down the middle, relying on the goalkeeper’s instinct to dive the wrong way, was popularised by the Czechoslovak international Antonín Panenka, who immortalised it in the final of Euro 1976, when his national team defeated West Germany.

[2] Several quarrels that broke out during the tournament—including one altercation over the towel used by the Senegalese goalkeeper—were interpreted as stemming from attempts to resort to “black magic” in order to cast a spell on the opposing team.

[3] Three matches will be played in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina to mark the centenary of the World Cup. One match will take place in Montevideo, Uruguay, in tribute to Uruguay’s role as both host nation and winner of the inaugural 1930 tournament. Another will be played in Argentina, in recognition of the country’s place as runner-up in that same first edition. The third match will be held in Paraguay, in acknowledgment of the fact that the country is home to the headquarters of CONMEBOL (the South American Football Confederation), the first—and only—confederation in existence at the time of the founding 1930 tournament.