Edem Mensah
CAF Leadership Structure; CAF Presidents, Year of Leadership and Their Achievements
The Confederation of African Football, CAF Leadership is a regional organization founded on February 8, 1957, with headquarters located in 6th of October City, Giza, Egypt. It serves the African region and has 56 member associations.
CAF is presided over by Patrice Motsepe and has five vice presidents, namely Augustin Senghor, Ahmed Yahya, Waberi Souleiman, Seidou Mbombo Njoya, and Kanizat Ibrahim. The General Secretary of CAF is Véron Mosengo-Omba.
CAF is a subsidiary of FIFA and has five other subsidiaries catering to different regions of Africa, namely UNAF (North Africa), WAFU (West Africa), UNIFFAC (Central Africa), CECAFA (East Africa), and COSAFA (Southern Africa).
The Confederation of African Football (CAF) governs association football, beach soccer, and futsal in Africa. It was established on February 8, 1957, in Khartoum, Sudan, by the national football associations of Egypt, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Sudan. The decision to form the body was made after formal discussions between these associations at the FIFA Congress in Lisbon, Portugal, on June 7, 1956.
As the African Confederation of FIFA, CAF organizes, runs, and regulates national team and club continental competitions annually or biennially.
CAF
CAF also controls the prize money and broadcast rights to these competitions. Starting in 2026, CAF will be allocated nine spots at the FIFA World Cup and could have a chance of ten spots with the addition of an intercontinental play-off tournament involving six teams to decide the last two FIFA World Cup places (46+2).
Initially, the main headquarters of CAF was situated within the offices of the Sudanese Football Association in Khartoum. However, a fire outbreak led to the relocation of the headquarters to a town near Cairo, Egypt, until 2002.
Youssef Mohamad was the first general secretary, and Abdel Aziz Abdallah Salem was the first president. In an unopposed election held in Rabat, Morocco, on March 12, 2021, Patrice Motsepe from South Africa was elected as the new president.
CAF Competitions:
National Men teams:
– Africa Cup of Nations
– African Nations Championship
– U-23 Africa Cup of Nations
– U-20 Africa Cup of Nations
– U-17 Africa Cup of Nations
– African Schools Football Championship
– Futsal Africa Cup of Nations
– African Youth Olympic Futsal Qualifying Tournament
– Beach Soccer Africa Cup of Nations
National Women Teams:
– Women’s Africa Cup of Nations
– African U-20 Women’s World Cup qualification
– African U-17 Women’s World Cup qualification
– African Schools Girls’ Football Championship
Clubs:
– African Football League
– CAF Champions League
– CAF Confederation Cup
– CAF Super Cup
– CAF Women’s Champions League
Defunct:
– African Cup Winners’ Cup
– CAF Cup
InterContinental:
Defunct:
– Afro-Asian Cup of Nations
– Afro-Asian Club Championship
– UEFA–CAF Meridian Cup
Regional:
– CECAFA Cup
– WAFU Nations Cup
– Amilcar Cabral Cup
– COSAFA Cup
– CEMAC Cup
– UNIFFAC Cup (U-17)
– UNAF U-23 Tournament
CAF Leadership Achievement in Organizing Competitions:
CAF International Football
CAF organized the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) in 1957, shortly after its formation, and it has since become its flagship competition.
However, faced with the decline in popularity of local competitions and the mass exodus of homegrown footballers to Europe, Asia, and the Americas in the 1990s and early 2000s, CAF launched the African Nations Championship (alternatively, though not widely used, the Championship of African Nations (CHAN)) on 11 September 2007. It began organizing two years later to address this issue.
CAF Leadership also organizes qualification tournaments/competitions for its member associations for the FIFA U-20 World Cup and the FIFA U-17 World Cup. Both initially began on a home-and-away two-legged basis but have since 1995 been organized in appointed host countries as respectively the Under-20 and U-17 Africa Cup of Nations.
For women’s football, CAF operates competitions that currently serve as qualification tournaments for the related FIFA-organized tournaments which were launched in the same year as their formation. The flagship African women’s football competition/tournament is the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations, which launched in 1991 as the African Women’s Championship.
It was known in the mass media between 2015 and 2021 as the Africa/African Women/Women’s Cup of Nations. It currently qualifies 4 teams for the FIFA Women’s World Cup.
CAF Leadership also organizes qualification matches for “promising future female footballers” at both the Under-20 and Under-17 levels. These were launched in 2002 and 2008, respectively, and both qualify 2 teams to compete at the FIFA U-20 Women’s World Cup and the FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup, respectively. There are no champions crowned in these tournaments.
CAF Club Football
There are several football club competitions organized by the Confederation of African Football (CAF). The CAF Men’s and Women’s Champions League, the CAF Confederation Cup, the CAF Super Cup, and the African Schools Football Championship for both males and females are among them.
The African Cup of Champions Clubs, also known as the African Cup, was first held in 1964. It was rebranded as the CAF Champions League in 1997 and is considered a prestigious football club competition.
The current format features the champions of top-division leagues of CAF member associations and the runner-up teams of the league classifications of member associations in the top 12 ranked national associations as documented by the CAF 5-year ranking system.
The African Cup Winners’ Cup was a competition that started in 1975 for national cup winners of member associations. Another competition, the CAF Cup, was launched in 1992 for African teams that finished below the top 2 positions of the league classifications of member associations and didn’t meet any criteria for qualification to any CAF competition.
In 2004, CAF merged these two competitions to form the current second-tier CAF Confederation Cup.
CAF Confederation
The CAF Confederation Cup incorporates the participation of national cup winners from the Cup Winners’ Cup while maintaining the format of the participation of teams that finished 3rd in the top-division league classifications of the 12 highest-ranked member associations as documented by the CAF 5-Year Ranking system from the CAF Cup. The CAF Champions League is ranked higher than the CAF Confederation Cup.
The winners of the CAF Champions League played the winners of the African Cup Winners’ Cup until 2004. Since then, they have played against the winners of the CAF Confederation Cup in the CAF Super Cup, which was launched in 1993.
The Afro-Asian Club Championship was an annual football match jointly organized between CAF and the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) between the winners of the CAF Champions League and the winners of the AFC Champions League between 1987 and 1999.
The CAF Women’s Champions League was announced and approved on June 30, 2020, launched on September 12 of that year, and began contesting the following year, i.e., 2021. It features women’s national league and cup winners involving the champions of CAF’s sub-confederation qualification tournaments for women’s club teams.
CAF Sponsors
In October 2004, MTN, a South African telecommunications company, signed a four-year sponsorship deal worth US$12.5 million to sponsor CAF competitions, which was the biggest sponsorship deal in African sporting history at the time.
When MTN’s contract expired, CAF opened a new sponsorship callout, and in July 2009, French telecommunications giant Orange won the bid with an eight-year comprehensive long-term undisclosed deal to sponsor CAF competitions with a value of €100 million.
On July 21, 2016, French energy and petroleum giant Total S.A. replaced Orange as the main sponsor with an eight-year sponsorship package from CAF for a value of €950 million to support its competition. Total has since rebranded as Total Energies as of May 28, 2021.
