The Confederation of African Football is confronting a governance emergency not of its opponents' making but of its own institutional design. A series of contested hearings — spanning the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations title dispute, now before the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and a doping-related eligibility controversy in the continental club competition — has exposed deep structural weaknesses in how CAF's judicial and disciplinary committees conduct their proceedings. The problem is no longer isolated incidents. It is a pattern.
A Doping Case That Became a Due Process Scandal
Sudan's Al Hilal was already aggrieved after losing a two-legged quarter-final to Morocco's Renaissance Berkane on aggregate — a result they are challenging on the grounds that Berkane fielded a player, Hamza Moussaoui, who had returned a confirmed positive doping test. What should have been a straightforward disciplinary matter instead became a second grievance layered atop the first.
In a formal statement issued after the Disciplinary Committee hearing, Al Hilal alleged that the session's chair, Othman Keïné, had previously participated in the decision to lift a temporary suspension on the player in question — a decision the club characterised as the very event that triggered the eligibility dispute. The club objected immediately. The objection was overruled. The club further alleged that the opposing party had prior knowledge of the panel's composition and had endorsed it at a preparatory meeting from which Al Hilal was absent — a circumstance, if accurate, that would represent a textbook conflict of interest under most recognised standards of procedural fairness.
The procedural complaints did not end there. Al Hilal stated that one panel member declared he could not understand English without any interpretation being arranged, that the club's representatives were excluded from the room while deliberations and voting were still underway, and that the opposing legal counsel was permitted to remain in the session during that same period. The club also alleged that key information was communicated informally to its representatives rather than through official written channels, and that an unsolicited suggestion was made — without explanation — that the club should change its legal team. Al Hilal described the hearing as "fundamentally flawed" and the outcome as "a systematic disregard for the principles of justice and transparency."
Following the ruling against it, Al Hilal submitted an urgent request to CAF's Appeals Committee, supported by four specific articles of the Disciplinary Committee regulations, asking that the semi-final between Renaissance Berkane and AS FAR be postponed until the appeal is resolved. The club argued — with some legal logic — that if it prevailed on appeal after the fixture had already been held, the remedy would be effectively meaningless.
Senegal's AFCON Complaint Reveals a Structural Problem, Not an Isolated One
What makes the Al Hilal case particularly damaging for CAF is not its severity in isolation, but how closely it mirrors the complaints raised months earlier by Senegal's football federation over the Africa Cup of Nations title dispute. That case, in which CAF's Appeals Committee acknowledged Morocco's right to the title following a protest over an eligibility matter during the final, is now being examined by the Court of Arbitration for Sport after Senegal rejected the outcome.
Abdoulah Sow, Secretary-General of the Senegalese Football Federation, described the appeal hearing as a procedural absurdity. He recounted that the session began late after a last-minute rescheduling, that Senegal was placed in a waiting room for two hours after presenting its initial response, and that the session was concluded without any notification — he only learned it was over by contacting a CAF administrator directly. Senegal's legal counsel, he said, was given no opportunity to argue before the committee. "How can an appeal hearing be held without pleadings?" Sow asked publicly. His characterisation of the outcome as predetermined was unambiguous: "The chairwoman had a mission and she carried it out."
Sow also flagged a structural concern that transcends any single case: the presence of a sitting national federation president on what is supposed to be an independent Appeals Committee. He specifically identified the president of the Tunisian federation as a committee member — a detail that, if accurate, cuts directly against the principle that judicial bodies within governing institutions must be insulated from parties who may have institutional interests in the outcomes before them. This is not a procedural technicality. It is the foundational requirement of any body claiming adjudicatory authority.
Egypt's Al Ahly and the Pattern of Institutional Dysfunction
A third complaint, from Egypt's Al Ahly, adds another dimension to the picture. The club submitted a formal protest after receiving consecutive notifications postponing a scheduled hearing on its appeal against a fan-attendance ban imposed following an incident involving its supporters at Cairo Stadium. The hearing was rescheduled twice within hours, then postponed indefinitely — with the underlying competition fixture approaching. Al Ahly argued, reasonably, that an appeal right that cannot be exercised before the relevant event produces its consequences is not a genuine right at all.
Taken together, these three cases — from three different countries, involving three different bodies within CAF, across two different competitions — describe an organisation whose internal judiciary is not functioning as a credible, independent, or procedurally competent system. The complaints are not about losing decisions. They are about the process by which decisions are reached: late notice, opaque composition, exclusion of parties during deliberation, absence of interpretation, and informal communication of material information.
CAF's Regulatory Reform Effort Arrives Late but Cannot Be Dismissed
CAF acknowledged, in a general sense, that something is wrong. In April, the confederation announced it was pursuing amendments to its regulations and planned to replace officials across several of its committees. The timing of this announcement — arriving while multiple active disputes were winding through the very committees under scrutiny — is awkward at best. It risks the appearance of institutional triage rather than genuine reform.
Governing bodies in international sport have faced these questions before. FIFA's own governance crisis a decade ago produced extensive structural changes, including the formal separation of its judicial bodies from its executive functions and the introduction of term limits and independence requirements for committee members. CAF is a structurally distinct organisation with different resources and political dynamics, but the underlying principle is the same: committees that adjudicate disputes between parties must be — and must visibly be — independent of those parties and of the officials responsible for prior decisions in the same matter.
The cases now before the Court of Arbitration for Sport will take time to resolve. What CAF does in the interim — whether its announced reforms produce genuine independence requirements, clear recusal rules, and transparent composition processes — will determine whether the institution can recover its credibility with member federations and clubs, or whether the pattern deepens. Three formal complaints in a single continental calendar is not a coincidence. It is a signal that the system, as currently designed, is producing outcomes that too many parties find impossible to accept as legitimate.
