Amid COVID-19: CAF sticks to January Date For AFCON 2021

The Confederation of African Football (CAF) is still sticking to a January start for the 2021 Africa Cup of Na­tions (AFCON), despite on­going uncertainty about the continent’s football because of corona virus.

Unclear when many com­petitions will resume across the continent, where only a handful of leagues are op­erating, the tournament in Cameroon is shrouded in doubt.

CAF itself has yet to con­firm a restart date for any of its own tournaments amidst the pandemic, with Camer­oon the sixth worst-affected country in Africa with nearly 10,000 reported cases.

Four of the six rounds of AFCON qualifying have still to take place.

“The Africa Cup of Na­tions is still planned for Cameroon from January 10 to February 8, 2021,” CAF’s competitions director, Sam­son Adamu told BBC Sport Africa.

“That is subject to change as the AFCON is still being assessed. The final decision is to be taken by the Exec­utive Committee soon,” he said.

Last week CAF’s Acting Secretary General, Abdel Bah told Cameroon media that ‘hosting the AFCON next January remains CAF’s number one priority external-link amid consider­ations.’ Yet if qualifying does not take place in the interna­tional windows in October and November (playing two rounds each month), staging the expanded 24-team tourna­ment in seven months’ time is unlikely to happen.


Rounds three and four of qualifying should have been played in March, with the penultimate round in early June and the final round between August 31 and Sep­tember 8.

All these dates have been cancelled though because of the corona virus, whose true impact on Africa is unclear because of a testing shortage in many countries. “We no longer include September in the strategies because it will be quite complicated to have the teams travel from one country to another as early as September,” Bah told Cam­eroon’s Radio Sport Info.
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“We remain very attentive to the development of the health crisis. If we cannot catch up with AFCON qual­ifying in October and No­vember, we’ll need to think of another plan,” Bah said.

INDEPEN­DENT reports that, should the AFCON be moved, it would be the third time the tournament has changed date – after its original Janu­ary/February 2021 date was rescheduled for June/July 2021 after CAF finally chose against playing in the middle of the European season.

Earlier this year, CAF moved the tournament back to January/February, which it said was because of Cam­eroon’s climatic conditions while others pointed to a tim­ing clash with the Club World Cup. That FIFA tournament has now been moved back to 2022, which is when CAF might schedule the AFCON as 2021 fills up with delayed 2020 competitions such as the Olympics and European and South American club cham­pionships.

“As everyone knows, play­ing in June/July in Camer­oon is difficult because of the weather conditions,” said Bah.

“There is already a lot of a competition with the Eu­ros and Copa America, so the best time to postpone the AFCON would be to January 2022,” Bah added.

Meanwhile, CAF has rated former Nigeria internation­al, Austin Okocha as one of the most talented dribblers the continent’s ever pro­duced.

CAF stated this while re­acting to organiser of the English top flight, Premier League, on their remem­brance of Okocha’s signing by Bolton Wanderers on June 18, 2002.