March 31 – Confederation of African Football (CAF) president Patrice Motsepe has announced a wide-ranging reform of the African men’s national team calendar following an executive committee meeting in Cairo at the weekend.
From 2028 the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) will expand from 24 to 28 teams but will move from a biennial to a quadrennial schedule.
To make up for the shortfall in international competition on the continent of moving its showpiece to every four years, CAF will launch an annual Nations League starting in 2029, that will have a 16-team final tournament held every two years.
In 2019 the competition was expanded from 16 to 24 teams.
“This is evidence of our commitment to world-class football, with the best African players from all over the world returning to compete on the continent,” said Motsepe.
Hosting the competition at 24 teams has been a challenge for African nations in each of the past three editions. Morocco stepped in to host the 2025 edition after Guinea were stripped of the hosting rights for not making enough progress with promised infrastructure.
Motsepe said the 2027 edition to be jointly hosted by Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda is on track. Morocco is the back-up solution for hosting if the 2027 hosts don’t fulfil on infrastructure promises.
Motsepe said the change was in response to a need for “predictable, consistent, and reliable” fixtures, though didn’t explain why that can’t delivered in the current cycle following the success of the Moroccan tournament completed in January. The first rule of media is that you don’t fix something that isn’t broken. The last AFCON in Morocco suggested that CAF had fixed its major tournament, despite its chaotic ending.
The switch to playing its showpiece in even numbered years follows a request by FIFA to tidy up all the major confederation championships into the same four-year cycle. That may be good for FIFA, leaving uncluttered space in the international calendar for its own international competition ambitions – and in particular its Club World Cup – but it isn’t necessarily good for the confederations and the commercial proposition to advertising and media.
In 2028 AFCON will go up against the powerhouse of UEFA’s Euro Championships for major sponsorship and media revenue. AFCON is unlikely to win that battle.
The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) has also been asked by FIFA to switch its blue riband Asian Cup to even years. The AFC said it had suspended bidding for the 2031 and 2035 editions of the Asian Cup (2031 was at an advanced stage) to consider the proposal. Moving the dates will also have a major impact on the AFC’s crucial tender of its commercial and media rights for the next cycle.
In December 2025, the AFC launched the tender for its commercial and media rights covering the 2029–2036 cycle. This eight-year, two-cycle tender covers 2029-2032 and 2033-2036. Switching the Asian Cup to even years would mean either playing its next edition in either 2030, three years after the 2027 edition in Saudi Arabia in January, or five years after the 2027 edition in 2032.
Having established the expanded Asian Cup in 2019 as a major tournament and expanded all key measurement metrics in the 2023 edition in Qatar (played in January 2024), the risk of changing a schedule that has only just broken through both in fan engagement and commercial attraction, is great.
The AFC has not rolled over to FIFA’s request as quickly as the Africans, though with many things in African football’s recent history, what is promised by CAF cannot always be counted on to be delivered.
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