Confederation of African Football

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 8th of February 1957, the Confederation of African Football came into existence at the Grand Hotel in Khartoum, Sudan. The political groundwork had been laid three years earlier. The 1954 FIFA Congress in Bern, Switzerland, had formally recognised Africa as a distinct football confederation. CAF, as the body is universally known, was charged with governing association football, beach soccer, and futsal across the continent. In its founding year, CAF organised the inaugural Africa Cup of Nations. The decades that followed would test and expand what that mandate actually meant.

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• 2. Zones, Leaders, and a New Home

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  Fifty-four national football associations make up the CAF membership. They are distributed across five regional bodies. The Union of North African Football covers five nations. The West African Football Union encompasses sixteen. The Central African Football Federations' Union has eight members. The Council for East and Central Africa Football Associations covers eleven nations. The Council of Southern Africa Football Associations has fourteen. Two associations sit outside the regional structure as non-regional members.

  CAF's original headquarters were located within the offices of the Sudanese Football Association in Khartoum. A fire forced the organisation to relocate, and the body subsequently moved to a site near Cairo, Egypt. The first general secretary of CAF was Youssef Mohamad. The first president was Abdel Aziz Abdallah Salem. The current president is Patrice Motsepe of South Africa. He was first elected to the role unopposed on the 12th of March 2021, in elections held in Rabat, Morocco.

  On the 18th of September 2007, CAF opened a competition for all African composers to write the organisation's official anthem. The brief called for a piece with no lyrics. It was to reflect what CAF described as the cultural patrimony and the music of Africa. That anniversary year also saw CAF introduce a new competition. It was designed to address a problem that had been developing in African domestic football for over a decade.

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• 3. A Calendar Across Generations

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  On the 11th of September 2007, CAF launched the African Nations Championship, commonly known as CHAN. Its creation responded to a specific concern. By the 1990s and early 2000s, African players had been departing for clubs in Europe, Asia, and the Americas in significant numbers. That outflow had weakened local competitions across the continent. CHAN addressed the problem by restricting entry to players active in their own country's domestic league. Organisation of the first edition began two years after the launch announcement, in 2009.

  The Women's Africa Cup of Nations is CAF's flagship competition for women's national teams. CAF ran the first edition in 1991 under the name African Women's Championship. Between 2015 and 2021, the tournament was known by various related titles in the wider media before settling into its current name. Today it qualifies four teams from Africa for the FIFA Women's World Cup. CAF also runs qualifying competitions for women at younger age levels. The Under-20 tournament launched in 2002, and the Under-17 equivalent launched in 2008. Neither of these crowns a champion. Each sends two teams to the corresponding FIFA global tournament.

  From 1995 onward, CAF restructured its men's youth qualifying competitions. Previously organised on a home-and-away two-legged format, they were converted into centralised tournaments held in designated host countries. They operate today under the names the Under-20 Africa Cup of Nations and the U-17 Africa Cup of Nations. Alongside all of that national team activity, CAF also built a separate structure for the continent's clubs. That architecture dates back to the earliest years of the organisation's existence.

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• 4. The Club Game

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  In 1964, CAF held the first African Cup of Champions Clubs, a tournament sometimes simply called the African Cup. The competition was rebranded in 1997 as the CAF Champions League. Today it draws participation from the champions of top-division leagues across member associations. Runners-up from the twelve highest-ranked associations also qualify, with rankings determined by CAF's five-year ranking system.

  The African Cup Winners' Cup commenced in 1975, open to the winners of each member association's national cup. The CAF Cup launched in 1992, for clubs that had finished below the top two positions in their domestic leagues. In 1993 CAF added the CAF Super Cup, a match between the winners of the Champions League and the Cup Winners' Cup. In 2004, CAF merged the Cup Winners' Cup and the CAF Cup into a new competition: the CAF Confederation Cup. This second-tier competition preserved the participation of national cup winners from the former Cup Winners' Cup. It also maintained a place for clubs finishing third in the leagues of the twelve highest-ranked associations. From 2004 onward, the Super Cup matched Champions League winners against Confederation Cup winners.

  Between 1987 and 1999, CAF and the Asian Football Confederation jointly organised the Afro-Asian Club Championship. Each year it brought together the winners of the CAF Champions League and the winners of the AFC Champions League.

  On the 30th of June 2020, CAF announced the CAF Women's Champions League. It launched formally on the 12th of September that year. The first contested edition took place in 2021.

  Al Ahly SC of Egypt has accumulated 26 titles across CAF competitions, more than any other club. Measured by nation, Egyptian clubs hold a total of 44 titles. Tunisian clubs stand at 24, and Moroccan clubs also at 24, placing both jointly behind Egypt in the all-time standings. All of that competition infrastructure required sustained financial backing, a task that fell to a series of major sponsorship agreements.

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• 5. Sponsorship and the Growing Prize

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  In October 2004, South African telecommunications company MTN signed a four-year sponsorship deal with CAF valued at US$12.5 million. It was, at that moment, the largest sponsorship agreement in African sporting history. When MTN's contract expired, French telecommunications company Orange secured the next deal. In July 2009, Orange signed an eight-year agreement worth €100 million.

  On the 21st of July 2016, French energy and petroleum company Total S.A. replaced Orange as CAF's principal sponsor. Total's eight-year package was valued at €950 million. On the 28th of May 2021, the company rebranded globally as TotalEnergies, and the CAF partnership carried that new identity forward. The commercial agreements sustaining CAF's calendar grew in scale across these decades. In parallel, Africa's national teams were accumulating milestones on the global stage at FIFA World Cups.

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• 6. Africa at the World Cup

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  In 1934, an African team qualified for the FIFA World Cup for the first time. Subsequent tournaments brought new benchmarks. In 1970, an African team drew a World Cup match for the first time. In 1978, an African nation won a World Cup match. Four years later, in 1982, an African team won two matches within a single tournament.

  The 1986 World Cup delivered two landmarks simultaneously. An African team qualified for consecutive World Cups for the first time. An African nation also reached the knockout stage, advancing to the round of sixteen. In 1990, an African team went further still, reaching the quarter-finals. Through 1994 and 1998, an African team topped its group and reached the round of sixteen in back-to-back tournaments.

  In 2002, an African team reached the quarter-finals on its very first World Cup appearance. The 2010 tournament brought a different kind of landmark: an African nation hosted the FIFA World Cup for the first time. In 2014, two African teams reached the round of sixteen within the same tournament. Then in 2022, an African nation reached the semi-finals for the first time, finishing in fourth place.

  From 2026, CAF will be allocated nine spots in the expanded 48-team World Cup. A tenth spot could follow through an intercontinental play-off, in which six nations compete for two of the final places. The players who have represented African nations across those tournaments are part of a separate tradition of recognition that CAF has cultivated since 1999.

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• 7. The Players They Remembered

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  At the World Football Gala 1999, CAF honoured the results of its vote to identify the best African players of the century. George Weah received 95 points in the men's category, ahead of Roger Milla on 77 and Abédi Pelé on 72. Joseph-Antoine Bell took the goalkeeper award with 39 points. For women's football, Uche Eucharia Ngozi won the equivalent prize with 21 points.

  In 2007, as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations, CAF ran an online poll to determine the top 30 African players of the period from 1957 to 2007. Roger Milla came first in that Golden Jubilee ranking. Mahmoud El Khatib placed second, and Hossam Hassan came third.

  Godfrey Chitalu of Zambia leads the all-time CAF international goalscoring table with 79 goals in 111 appearances, across a career spanning 1968 to 1980. His compatriot Kinnah Phiri scored 71 goals in 117 matches between 1973 and 1981. Egypt's Hossam Hassan accumulated 69 goals from 177 appearances between 1985 and 2006. Among those still active in international football, Mohamed Salah had scored 67 goals in 115 caps, and Sadio Mané stood at 53 goals from 126 appearances.

  Pyramids FC won the 2025 CAF Super Cup, with RS Berkane as runners-up. AS FAR claimed their second Women's Champions League title in the same year. Chitalu's total of 79 international goals, achieved across a career that ended in 1980, remains the highest in CAF's all-time goalscoring record.

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