Morocco Won the AFCON. The CAF Just Said So. The Argument Is Beginning.

The CAF Appeal Board overturned the final result today. Senegal's 1-0 win has been declared a 3-0 forfeit. Morocco are now the 2025 AFCON champions. Senegal will appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

I do not believe this decision will hold. I want to write that on record before the discourse settles in either direction.

The cited regulations are Article 82 and Article 84 of the AFCON competition rules. The first prohibits a team from leaving the pitch without referee permission. The second specifies the penalty as forfeiture. The Senegal team did leave the pitch for fourteen minutes. They did so under the direction of their coach. They returned and completed the match.

The legal question is whether the referee's decision to continue the match after their return constituted implicit authorization for the prior absence. The referee continued play. The penalty was taken. The match completed. The trophy was awarded on the pitch. The CAF disciplinary process concluded with fines and bans on 28 January, without overturning the result. The appeal board has now reversed that conclusion.

This will not hold at CAS. The Court of Arbitration for Sport has overturned similar federation-level decisions in roughly comparable cases. The 2019 CAF Champions League final precedent is directly on point. When CAF tried to order a replay after Esperance opponents walked off, CAS reversed it. The principle was that referee decisions on the field of play take precedence over federation-level reinterpretations weeks or months later.

The Senegal Federation will fight this for a year. The CAS hearing will probably happen in the first quarter of 2027. The likely outcome is that Senegal's title is restored. The intervening months will be ugly. The Moroccan federation will defend the decision. The Senegalese will not concede. The CAF will look procedurally compromised regardless of which way it eventually goes.

What is happening here is not really about the football. The football has been decided for two months. What is happening is a contest over who controls the official memory of the tournament. Both federations understand this. Both are fighting accordingly.

The trophy is in Dakar. The CAF says it is in Rabat. The CAS will say where it actually is. Probably in late 2027. Until then, the only safe statement is that nobody knows what the 2025 AFCON officially is, and that uncertainty itself is the story.