CAF's 28-Team AFCON Plan Shot Down Before It Even Got Started

A Proposal That Was Never Going to Fly

Patrice Motsepe had the optics mapped out. A February press conference in Dar-es-Salaam, the continent's footballing spotlight, and a grand vision: expand the Africa Cup of Nations from 24 to 28 teams, beginning with the 2028 edition. The CAF president framed it as ambition, as progress, as part of a mission to make AFCON "world class." What he got instead was a quiet, emphatic rejection from his own executive committee — with one member calling it, in no uncertain terms, a "very bad idea."

The Guardian reported the plan's demise, and while the news itself is straightforward, the implications are anything but. This wasn't just a technical scheduling disagreement. It was a referendum on the direction of African football, on the tension between growth and quality, and on whether CAF's leadership is reading the room or reading its own press releases.

The Expansion Track Record

To understand why this proposal collapsed, you have to understand where AFCON has already been. The tournament expanded from 16 to 24 teams ahead of the 2019 edition in Egypt, a move that was itself contentious. Critics argued it diluted the competitive quality of the group stage, producing dead-rubber matches between teams that had no business being at a continental championship. Supporters countered that it gave smaller nations — Madagascar, Burundi, Mauritania — a taste of elite competition and expanded the tournament's commercial footprint.

The 2019 tournament produced some genuinely compelling narratives. Madagascar's run to the quarterfinals remains one of AFCON's great fairy tales. But the expanded format also delivered group stages bloated with cautious, low-stakes football. Of the 36 group-stage matches at that tournament, nine ended in draws, and several featured teams playing out the string with qualification already sealed or already impossible.

By the time the 2023 edition in Ivory Coast rolled around (played in early 2024 due to scheduling), the 24-team format had settled into something functional. The host nation's dramatic comeback to win the tournament — overturning a group-stage crisis to lift the trophy — provided a narrative arc that any format would be proud of. The quality was there. The jeopardy was there. So the question becomes: what problem was a 28-team tournament supposed to solve?

The Quality Dilution Problem

The arithmetic is unforgiving. Africa has 54 FIFA-affiliated nations. Expanding to 28 teams would mean more than half the continent qualifies. That's a staggering ratio. For comparison, the European Championship expanded to 24 teams out of 55 associations (roughly 43.6%), and even that has drawn criticism for producing group-stage mismatches and an elongated tournament calendar.

At 28 teams, AFCON would need either seven groups of four or a more convoluted format involving best third-place finishers — a mechanism that has plagued the Euros and World Cup with confusion and mathematical gymnastics nobody asked for. The knockout rounds would need to accommodate 16 teams, requiring an extra round and extending a tournament that already runs for roughly a month and clashes with the European club season.

The quality gap between Africa's top 15-18 teams and the rest is real and measurable. In recent FIFA rankings, the drop-off from teams like Senegal, Morocco, Egypt, and Nigeria to nations ranked 80th or below is stark. You're not creating opportunity; you're manufacturing mismatches. And in a sport increasingly driven by broadcast value and competitive integrity, that's a losing proposition.

The Bottom Line: Expanding AFCON to 28 teams would have meant filling television slots with fixtures that lack competitive tension. That's not growth — it's bloat.

The Scheduling Nightmare

AFCON already exists in a scheduling no-man's-land. The tournament has traditionally been held in January and February, a window that puts it in direct conflict with European club football. Players like Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mané, and Achraf Hakimi are torn between national duty and their employers, and clubs have made no secret of their frustration.

The 2023 tournament moved to a June-July window to ease that friction, but the trade-off was playing in Ivory Coast's rainy season. Weather disruptions were a genuine concern. A 28-team tournament would require more matches, more rest days, and more travel — stretching the calendar further and making the domestic-vs-international tension worse, not better.

Consider the numbers: the current 24-team format produces 52 matches. A 28-team format with seven groups of four would produce 60+ matches — an increase of at least eight games, not counting potential expansion of the knockout phase. That's nearly two additional matchdays of programming, venues, and logistics. In a continent where infrastructure challenges are already significant, that's not a trivial ask.

The Political Subtext

Motsepe's proposal didn't emerge in a vacuum. It arrived against the backdrop of FIFA's expansion of the World Cup to 48 teams, a move that allocated nine direct spots to Africa (up from five). That expansion was seen as a political victory for African football, and Motsepe may have calculated that momentum would carry into AFCON reform.

But there's a crucial difference between expanding the World Cup — a global event with massive infrastructure and revenue — and expanding a continental tournament that operates on a fraction of the budget. FIFA can absorb a 48-team World Cup because the economics of the event support it. CAF's commercial model is far more fragile, and the executive committee clearly recognized that adding four more teams risked overextending the product without a corresponding revenue uplift.

There's also the governance angle. Motsepe has been CAF president since 2021, and his tenure has been marked by ambitious rhetoric about modernization. But ambition without institutional buy-in is just noise. The fact that his own executive committee publicly torpedoed this idea suggests a power dynamic where Motsepe's proposals need to survive scrutiny, not just press conferences.

"It was a very bad idea." — An unnamed CAF executive committee member, speaking on the expansion proposal.

What CAF Actually Needs

The rejection of expansion shouldn't be mistaken for complacency. CAF's stated aim of making AFCON "world class" is the right ambition. But the pathway to that goal runs through infrastructure, officiating standards, broadcast quality, and competitive balance — not through adding four teams that would dilute all of the above.

Consider what the 2023 tournament in Ivory Coast got right: packed stadiums, dramatic knockout rounds, a host nation lifting the trophy in front of its own fans. Those are the ingredients of a world-class event. Now consider what it got wrong: VAR controversies, pitch quality complaints, and logistical headaches for traveling supporters. Fix those, and AFCON's reputation grows organically.

The African Champions League has seen its profile rise in recent years. Morocco's 2022 World Cup semifinal run proved that African football can compete at the highest level. The talent pipeline — players emerging from academies in Senegal, Ghana, Mali, and Cameroon and starring in Europe — has never been stronger. The product on the pitch doesn't need more teams. It needs better conditions for the teams already there.

The Verdict: The executive committee got this one right. AFCON's growth should be qualitative, not quantitative. A tighter, more competitive 24-team tournament with better organization and infrastructure will do more for African football's global standing than a bloated 28-team spectacle ever could.

What's Next

With the expansion plan dead, attention turns to the 2025 AFCON in Morocco, which will be a critical litmus test for the current format. Morocco's infrastructure — honed by its World Cup 2030 co-hosting preparations — should deliver a tournament that sets new standards for the competition. If the product is strong, the case for staying at 24 teams becomes ironclad.

For Motsepe, the rejection is a political setback but not a fatal one. The best leaders know when to abandon a bad idea and redirect energy toward achievable goals. His next move should focus on the substance of CAF's operations: refereeing standards, commercial partnerships, and ensuring that AFCON's scheduling window works for players, clubs, and fans alike.

African football doesn't need to be bigger. It needs to be better. This rejection is the first sign that CAF's decision-makers understand the difference.