Rabat – CAF’s decision to award Morocco the AFCON 2025 title after ruling that Senegal had forfeited the final and recording the result as 3-0 for the Atlas Lions did more than change the official outcome of the tournament.
It notably sparked a strong international media reaction that quickly went beyond the rules of the game and turned into something more emotional, political, and in most cases, misleading.
In Spanish, English, and French-language coverage, one main idea has kept coming back: Morocco did not win the title on the pitch, but in the offices.
Because the trophy changed hands weeks after the final, many reports have described the decision as a scandal. Because Senegal had already celebrated, some suggested Morocco’s title was not real
And because the ruling ended in Morocco’s favor after weeks of tense, behind-the-curtain debates over the chaos of the AFCON final, others began to question CAF’s neutrality.
Yet what much of this coverage ignores is a simple legal fact: CAF did not hand Morocco the title as a favor. Once the Appeal Board ruled that Senegal’s actions fell under the competition rules, Morocco’s win by forfeit followed as the natural, legally appropriate outcome.
The real issue was never which team looked more deserving in emotional terms, but rather whether the regulations would be applied in the biggest match of the tournament. And that is the point, much of the foreign coverage has been missing.
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Framing matters
Some of the strongest reactions came from Spain, where several sports outlets presented CAF’s decision as a football scandal.
“Global scandal: Senegal are stripped of the Africa Cup, and Morocco are given the title,” Diario AS headlined its cover story about CAF’s announcement of Morocco’s win.
In what has become the hallmark of Morocco-related coverage in much of the Spanish press, the article failed to mention the overall background of the outcome, the long post-final saga around CAF regulations and their implementation, as well as CAF’s own legal justification of its belated decision to appropriate punish Senegal’s dramatic decision to walk off the pitch in protest at a perceived referring bias.
While AS mentioned Article 84 of CAF regulations as the main factor behind the confederation’s decision to overturn the initial AFCON outcome, its hostile, Morocco-bashing headline had already set the tone.
Conveniently keeping Senegal’s breach of the CAF rules out of the frame of discussion, the selectively outraged article rather tellingly maintained its narrative focus on the shock of seeing the title change hands weeks after the final.
El Confidencial went even further. “The Moroccans won in the offices what they could not win on the pitch,” the Spanish newspaper wrote in its coverage of this development. This is a strong line, but it does not describe the situation accurately.
Rather than Morocco winning in the offices, it was Senegal that lost for its unlawful and inexcusable behavior on the pitch. If framing matters in life, it is both indispensable and revealing in journalism.
How a media organization or journalist frames a particular story says everything about whether their goal is to inform, distract, obfuscate, or rant. In football, a team does not only lose by conceding goals; it can also lose by breaking the rules of the game, of fair play engagement.
That is exactly why those regulations exist. Leaving the pitch is not a minor incident that can simply be brushed aside later. It is a serious breach. Once CAF decided that Senegal’s actions fell under Article 82, the punishment described in Article 84 was the automatic outcome.
All of which means that Morocco’s 3-0 scoreline was not invented “in the offices”, it was the result set out in the regulations long before the 2025 AFCON kicked off.
As such, CAF’s decision to overturn the initial result had nothing to do with the usual politics of internal lobbying and influence peddling. Instead, it was due to Senegal’s actions on the pitch.
While El Confidencial and Diario AS certainly knew all about this reasoning, they decided that it did not ultimately matter.
Instead, what mattered to them, even at the expense of objectivity and their own credibility, was to misleadingly portray Morocco as a bad loser that made sure to use its influence in CAF politics to change a legitimate result in its favor.
Even MARCA, which at least mentioned Morocco’s legal argument, still chose to frame the story as drama first and law second. By calling it “the mess of the century” and “an unprecedented twist,” the paper turned a legal ruling into a spectacle.
The rationale behind that choice was to get its readers to see the decision as chaos and controversy before even considering the regulations behind it.
MARCA did quote the Moroccan federation’s line that “it was not pride, it was the regulations,” and it noted that the FRMF’s appeal was about enforcing the competition rules, not denying Senegal’s effort on the pitch.
But that point was treated like a side note, not the heart of the case. Instead of giving due weight to the fact that CAF applied its own rulebook in this case, MARCA leaned into Morocco-bashing drama.
In doing so, it helped feed the wider narrative that Morocco benefited from a strange political decision, when the real issue was much simpler: Senegal broke the rules, and CAF applied the consequences of that breach.
The English-language press: shock first, law second
The same tone appeared in English-language coverage, where many outlets described CAF’s decision with surprise and disbelief.
Newsweek described it as a “shocking decision” and said that changing the result of a final after the match seemed “utterly extreme on the surface.”
The Guardian wrote that Senegal had been “sensationally stripped” of the title in an “unprecedented ruling.” Reuters, in a more careful tone, still described the case as a “hammer blow” to the image of African football.
What has been happening in this AFCON saga, from the shambolic final on January 18 to the intense internal debates that have taken place since, indeed feels dramatic. But the problem is that the coverage of this drama often focuses more on the shock felt than on why correctly applying CAF’s rulebook is the only way to ensure that something remotely like this never happens again.
A football match is not valid only because it reaches the final whistle. It also has to be played under the rules. If a team breaks those rules during the match by refusing to continue properly or by leaving the pitch without permission, the result can be cancelled.
If that principle is ignored, then the rules lose their value. A team could stop a match, leave the field, come back later, and still claim that only the final score matters. That would ultimately damage football.
Yet this is where some of the coverage moved away from analysis and into emotion. Senegal’s celebrations in Dakar, the anger of supporters, and the players mocking the ruling on social media all made the story more dramatic.
But emotional justice is not the same as legal justice. Yes, what happens in open play is important and relevant. But football is also about respecting the rules that make the match possible in the first place.
Refereeing controversy in context
Another argument that has kept coming up, especially in more detailed English-language coverage, was that Senegal’s reaction should be seen in the context of refereeing decisions that many felt favored Morocco.
This was part of The Athletic’s angle. The article pointed to a wider feeling among some observers that Morocco had received favorable calls during the tournament.
There were disputed moments against Cameroon, complaints from Nigeria after the semi-final, and more anger in the final when Senegal felt unfairly treated before Morocco were awarded a penalty.
In foregrounding this chain of events, The Athletic’s message seems to be that Senegal’s actions during the final, however wrong or indefensible, did not come out of nowhere.
That may be true. But it changes nothing legally.
Refereeing controversy is part of football. Teams can respond through VAR, official protests, post-match complaints, or appeals.
They do not respond by leaving the pitch. No competition rules treat that as an acceptable answer. Because, at the end of the day, you do not fix a refereeing decision by breaking the rules.
This is one of the weakest points in the ongoing criticism of CAF’s latest ruling. Much of this critical coverage treats Senegal’s walk-off as an understandable emotional reaction and then quietly uses that reaction to soften the seriousness of what happened.
But frustration does not cancel the regulations. If anything, rules matter most in exactly those tense moments, because they stop matches from being shaped by whichever team is most willing to disrupt them.
So yes, people can debate the refereeing. They can argue over whether Morocco got the benefit of certain calls. But that debate does not erase the fact that failure to properly deal with Senegal’s actions during the AFCON final would have left an indelible procedural stain on African football.
Why Moroccan coverage sounds different
One reason Moroccan coverage sounds different is that Moroccan media and officials have mostly treated the case as a legal matter, not an emotional one.
The FRMF made its position clear from the start. It never attacked Senegal or denied what happened on the pitch. It was only asking for the rules to be applied.
Moroccan outlets largely followed that same line. Even when they described the latest ruling as justice, their focus has been more on principle than celebration. That may be a less dramatic story than scandal, betrayal, or conspiracy. But it is the more serious one.
If CAF had refused to apply its own rules in the final just because the result would be controversial, that would have damaged its credibility much more.
It would have sent a message that in the biggest matches, the rules can bend when enforcing them becomes uncomfortable.
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Unpopular does not mean unfair
What stands out most in the international reaction is not that many people disagree with the outcome. It is that many reports seem to treat that disagreement as proof that the decision was wrong.
Morocco’s AFCON 2025 title will always be unusual. People will keep debating it. Some will always remember that it was confirmed after the final, not celebrated on the night. But unusual does not mean illegitimate.
Controversial does not mean unlawful. Unpopularity does not automatically mean unfair.
CAF ruled on the basis of regulations, not feelings. Senegal has every right to challenge that decision at CAS. But that does not mean the rules will suddenly stop mattering.
The real scandal would have been if CAF had ignored its own rulebook in the biggest match of the tournament and then tried to call that integrity.
