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Rabat – Senegal’s lawyers in the lingering dispute over the 2025 AFCON title face a tough, nearly unfeasible task of overturning a CAF verdict with a robust legal basis, sports lawyer Romain Bizzini said in recent comments reported by Marca.
With Senegal having decided to take the AFCON case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), Bizzini believes that CAF’s reasoning to strip Senegal of the title appears clear and strongly backed by the organization’s rules.
Bizzini, who has experience with FIFA, CAF, and CAS cases, explained the basis of the CAF ruling that awarded Morocco the title is very strong from a legal perspective.
“The decision is based on Articles 82 and 84 of the AFCON regulations,” Marca quoted him as saying. These rules state that if a team refuses to continue or leaves the pitch without the referee’s permission, it is considered to have lost the match.
“That team will lose 3-0,” the sports lawyer added, pointing to the automatic sanction provided for in the CAF regulations.
This means that, contrary to critics’ speculation across social medi platforms and media coverage of the ongoing AFCON saga, CAF did not create a new rule or interpret the situation politically.
Instead, Africa’s governing body applied existing regulations that are already part of the laws organizing the competitions under its purview.
Over the past days, many critics of the CAF ruling have mainly raised the timing issue, asking why it took two months to reach a final decision on the AFCON case.
Bizzini explained that CAF rules do not impose a strict deadline for the appeal decision itself, apart from a broader six-month window for investigations. He suggested that the complexity of the case and the need to hear all parties may explain the long delay.
Senegal’s chances are low
Of Senegal’s chances to win the case before CAS, the lawyer said: “A strict application of the rule should lead CAS to confirm the decision.”
He cautiously conceded, however, that Senegal could try to argue that the match cannot be considered a forfeit since it was played to the final whistle.
One possible argument in this line of defense is that the Senegalese team’s returning to the pitch to complete the match challenges the idea of a refusal to play.
For Bizzini, while the Senegalese team can invoke this and other potentially mitigating factors to make their case before CAS, “Senegal’s chances of success are quite low.”
Some observers have floated the idea of replaying the final, but Bizzini’s take is that this option is legally unrealistic. “The sanction is clear: a 3-0 defeat,” he explained.
