Senegal stripped of title: Afcon ruling is lawful, but it puts Caf’s reputation at risk
Résumé
This article examines the Confederation of African Football’s decision to overturn the result of the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations final, initially won on the field by Senegal and later legally awarded to Morocco. It argues that such a decision cannot be understood solely through the lens of sports law. A final is not only a sporting outcome, but also a mediated narrative shaped by images, commentary, emotions, and collective memory. By revising the result after the symbolic closure of the event, the institution did more than enforce a rule: it disrupted a public narrative that had already been stabilised. From an information and communication studies perspective, the case reveals a mismatch between different regimes of legitimacy: legal validity, on-field reality, media representation, and public reception. This controversy affects not only Caf’s reputational credibility, but also the symbolic stability of Afcon as a continental sports brand. More broadly, it highlights how, in the contemporary attention economy, the legitimacy of a sporting institution depends not only on procedural correctness, but also on its ability to align regulatory decisions with already circulating public meanings.