The Trouble Cup

The 2021 Africa Cup of Nations had been planned to be the best CAF tournament in history and it is a long way from reaching that goal. In fact it is on the opposite side. The constellation of stars gathered in Cameroon were the best advertisement for the African Football Confederation to attract followers and send the message that an CAN can be as attractive as a European Championship and a Copa America, however, each day of competition a new scandal and the image it gives is of being a very poorly organized tournament that borders on amateurism.

The calendar

The first problem that got in the way of CAN 2021 was the change of the calendar. Cameroon was supposed to host the tournament in 2019 but due to construction delays, CAF moved the tournament to Egypt. Cameroon had two years to complete first class stadiums that are empty for every match, but that was not the main organizational problem. Due to the heat in the region, the CAN 2021 was brought forward to January, which also took it away from the World Cup in Qatar in December. That caused the anger of the big leagues that have seen how many of their stars, especially in the Premier, have left the competition to play for their country. Too many enemies before starting the tournament.

Retransmission

No Spanish television channel bought the rights to CAN 2021, but CAF announced that it would broadcast its matches openly through its YouTube channel. In the midst of broadcasting from Cameroon-Burkina Faso, the broadcast was stopped because a South African network that had the rights denounced CAF for violating copyright law. CAF turned a deaf ear and the following day broadcast Morocco-Ghana live again, but half an hour into the game the signal was lost again due to the same problems. The organization does not have the rights to broadcast its own tournament.

The COVID

The tournament began in the midst of a new wave of COVID, associated with the rise of the omicron variant. And, as a consequence, almost all the teams announced cases among their members a few days before the start of the tournament. In some teams, the protocols failed scandalously, as in the case of Gambia, which reported 16 infected in its team. Morocco had to debut without a center forward because the three men who occupy that demarcation had coronavirus. Malawi, for example, played their first game with just four players on the bench, two of them goalkeepers.

The arbitration scandal

But the real ridicule was experienced on Wednesday in Tunisia-Mali when referee William Sikazwe, from Zambia, brought forward the end of the match by several minutes. In minute 85′ he put the whistle in his mouth and decreed the end to everyone’s surprise and with 1-0 in favor of the Malians. To the stupor of the Tunisian bench, the referee realized that something was wrong and resumed the match without much conviction. Only four minutes later, in minute 89, he finally whistled, also before regulation time. CAF forced to play the last minutes, but only Mali showed up at the restart, and not Tunisia, outraged by the lack of accuracy in the referee’s clock. A nonsense.