Jorge Vilda, pay disputes and incredible talent on show – Wafcon 2024 about to start a year late
Three years ago a very successful Wafcon was staged there and the North African country then agreed to organise the next two tournaments, as no other nation on the continent offered to shoulder the responsibility. The 2025 edition kicks off on Saturday evening, with the hosts playing Zambia in the opening game.
The increasing influence of Morocco in Caf's affairs has set tongues wagging, sometimes loudly, in the continent's governance corridors. Suleiman Waberi, a member of Caf's executive committee and the Fifa council, says Morocco should be commended for stepping up when others shirked away from the responsibility.
'At the time when we took the decision, in the executive committee, to give the tournaments to Morocco, no country wanted to host the competition,' he says. 'Are we supposed to reject what was a very sound, secure bid, just because it would mean that Morocco will be hosting it for a second successive time? They did a great job with the last tournament and there is no doubt that they will do so again.'
Morocco reached the final in their Wafcon debut before losing to South Africa but the impressive run was not enough for the FRMF, the Moroccan football federation, to keep the high-profile French coach Raymond Pedros, who had previously won the Women's Champions League with Lyon, in his job.
The FRMF's subsequent recruitment of Jorge Vilda, who won the World Cup with Spain in 2023 but was subsequently sacked amid the fallout from Luis Rubiales's unsolicited kiss on Jenni Hermoso, was an uncompromising statement about its thirst to see the Atlas Lionesses ascend the summit of the African women's game in the shortest possible time.
Vilda is acutely aware of Morocco's huge expectations. 'It's not a negative pressure. It's a huge desire to do well,' he told Caf's website. 'Winning a World Cup [was] the result of the work of many people over many years … Here, we are in a different reality, but I think that in almost two years, we have contributed to the progress of the selection and Moroccan women's football. We are very keen to see this translated into results, even if we know that it takes time to achieve this.'
They face some tough competition, though. South Africa's Banyana Banyana will want to retain their title and Nigeria's Super Falcons, the juggernaut of the African women's game, are out to win a 10th Wafcon title. There is also the hunger of Zambia's Copper Queens, who finished third in 2022, to go all the way with world-class players such as Barbara Banda and Racheal Kundananji to call upon. It is fair to say that the three-week tournament, which begins on Saturday with Zambia taking on the hosts, will be the most keenly contested in the 27-year history of the tournament as a standalone event.
Algeria, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Mali, Senegal, Tanzania and Tunisia are the other countries in the 12-team tournament, which will be staged in Rabat, Mohammédia, Casablanca, Berkane and Oujda. It was due to be held last year – and is still called the 2024 Wafcon – but a scheduling problem between Caf and Fifa meant it was delayed.
There are other problems too that cannot mask the organisational chaos creating a backroom nightmare for the continent's elite teams.
Desiree Ellis, who managed South Africa to their first continental title and has the responsibility to retain the trophy, continues to coach the team despite being out of contract for the past seven months. Her players are also in dispute with the South Africa Football Association over unpaid bonuses and allowances. Nora Hauptle, the Swiss coach of Zambia, meanwhile, reported the country's FA to Fifa for failing to pay her salary for several months.
And in what will not be a surprise for followers of the country's football, Nigeria could see its players stage yet another Wafcon strike in Morocco, as the players seethe with anger over unpaid qualification bonuses.
Sign up to Moving the Goalposts
No topic is too small or too big for us to cover as we deliver a twice-weekly roundup of the wonderful world of women's football
after newsletter promotion
The general secretary of the Nigerian Football Federation, Mohammed Sanusi, when asked by the Guardian why it is owing the players money, tersely said: 'The issue is purely a matter between the players and the NFF.'
Another NFF official told the Guardian: 'Our women, throughout the continent, are doing phenomenal things on the field. We, as officials, as those responsible for governance, have to do a lot better. The quality of the talent on the pitch must be matched by our management of the game off it, if the African game is to reach its potential.'
No connoisseur of the African women's game will disagree with that.
If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email moving.goalposts@theguardian.com.
This is an extract from our free weekly email, Moving the Goalposts. To get the full edition, visit this page and follow the instructions. Moving the Goalposts is delivered to your inboxes every Tuesday and Thursday.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
France seeking end to years of hurt and internal conflicts at Euro 2025
'I want people to stop asking me: 'Why haven't France won anything when you're one of the best teams in the world?'' Marie-Antoinette Katoto, like all her teammates, has only one dream this summer: to win the Euros. To do that, though, they have to come to terms with a history of tournament failures with the most recent one coming at the home Olympics last year, when they were knocked out by Brazil at the quarter-final stage. 'We have had opportunities and twice failed to win it at home in France. We have to have the humility to admit that,' admits Sakina Karchaoui, one of the team's vice-captains, referring also to the 2019 World Cup on home soil, when they lost to the USA in the quarter-finals. The list of failures is so long that the word 'finally' is added to any question about Les Bleues' chances. France have only managed to reach the semi-finals of a major women's competition on three occasions: the 2011 World Cup, the 2012 Olympic Games and Euro 2021. Repeated disappointments have taken a toll. 'Since we prepare for tournaments a year or two years in advance, when you arrive at the competition and you get eliminated quickly, yes, at some point it also has an impact on the mind,' says Grace Geyoro. 'It can be exhausting, especially when you see the [quality in the] team we have.' On Saturday, they start their latest mission at Euro 2025 against England in Zurich. It could not have been a tougher opening, the Lionesses having the last Euros in 2022 with a coach who also won the previous tournament, in 2019 with the Netherlands. The Dutch are also in France's group in Switzerland, together with Wales. France have always had individual quality. As far as the 2000s there have been players such as Louisa Nécib Cadamuro, Camille Abily, Marie-Laure Delie, Sandrine Soubeyrand and Laura Georges, before the arrival of Eugénie Le Sommer and Wendie Renard. All of which begs the question: Why haven't France triumphed in a major tournament. 'If we knew why France weren't winning, I think we'd have put things right by now,' says Abily, the fifth-most capped player in Les Bleues history with 183 caps between 2001 and 2017. 'I think there's a tendency in France to see football as an individual sport, thinking more about oneself before thinking about the team. That's what's been a bit lacking in the French team.' Grace Geyoro agrees: 'We've relied a lot on individuals, on the fact that one player can make the difference. Now we need to focus more on the collective, because we can only win together.' The team has often been shaken by internal conflicts, whether it be disagreements with the coach Corinne Diacre or players clashing such as Kheira Hamraoui and Aminata Diallo in 2021. Elise Bussaglia, who earned 192 caps between 2003 and 2019, says: 'The group hasn't always coped well, for various reasons. And it's true that at one point it could have had a detrimental effect on our results.' One of the areas of tension was the disconnect between the players from Lyon, who were professionals at the time, and those from Juvisy (later Paris FC) and Paris Saint-Germain, who were still semi-professional. The current Chelsea head coach, Sonia Bompastor, touches on the subject in her book Une vie de foot, which was published this year, writing: 'We weren't on the same wavelength at all, and we didn't have the same conception of what it meant to be a footballer. For me, losing a match was the end of the world; not for them.' Abily, who is Bompastor's assistant at Chelsea, insists that in her day, the team 'didn't realise' the quality it had. 'I remember that when we qualified for the semi-finals of the World Cup in 2011, we said to ourselves: 'Wow! That's great, we're here, we've qualified!' Bussaglia, who finished fourth with France at the 2011 World Cup and the following year's Olympics, adds: 'There are times when the French team should have at least won a medal, if not the title, and it didn't happen. There needs to be a bit more of a winning culture. But it's not just the federation, it's everyone: the players, the staff, the fans, everyone. Around this French team, there's still not enough desire to win.' Bompastor has also spoken about the lack of interest from the French FA in the women's team in the past. 'Nobody gave a damn about the French women's team,' she wrote in her book. 'We used to go and see Noël Le Graët, the president of the federation, to explain to him that the reason Lyon were European champions was because we'd put certain processes in place, and not because we'd gone off to summer camps with a singing coach [referring to Bruno Bini, Les Bleues coach from 2007 to 2013 who wrote songs for the players]. The only thing that mattered to him was our popularity rating and our good image.' There was a feeling by some players that the French FA was using the women's team to restore its reputation after the catastrophic 2010 World Cup when the men's team went on strike and refused to train by staying on the team bus. A lack of ambition is no longer true today, says Eric Blahic, who was assistant coach to Corinne Diacre and then Hervé Renard (2023-24) and was delighted to see the latter end the 'famous semi-final complex'. 'For years, the girls were told that they had to be in the sem-finals,' he says. 'That doesn't mean anything. Third or fourth is not the same thing. You have to say: the objective is the final.' He also rejects the idea that France have failed to go all the way because of a mental block. 'In 1982, when the French men's team played in the semi-final in Seville, when we led 3-1 and ended up being eliminated, people were already saying that it was mental problems. If that's all it was, the federation would have taken action a long time ago.' Laurent Bonadei was appointed as Renard's successor in August 2024 and since then a full-time mental performance coach, Thomas Sammut, has been part of the team 'to break this glass ceiling'. He has made other changes too, dropping three key players – Le Sommer, Renard and Kenza Dali – just before the Euros, saying that 'if it doesn't work you have to try something new'. Bonadei will also have to deal with Les Bleues' misfortune when it comes to penalties in major tournaments. Bussaglia says of the Olympics semi-final defeat to Japan in 2012: 'At the Olympics, in the semi-final, we were 2-1 down and I missed the penalty to make it 2-2. I'd never missed a penalty in my life but I missed that one.' Blahic, meanwhile, recalls the shootout loss to Australia in the 2023 World Cup, when Kenza Dali missed her spot kick against club teammate Mackenzie Arnold not once but twice as it was retaken. 'All the girls had taken lots of penalties in training, in all different forms, against three different goalkeepers,' he explains. Bonadei prefers to refer to France as 'outsiders' rather than favourites, despite having won their eight last games going into the tournament. 'Confidence is good for developing our game, but overconfidence is the trap that awaits us,' warns Bonadei. In Switzerland there is unlikely to be overconfidence as France have to battle against not only their opponents, but their past too.
BBC News
an hour ago
- BBC News
Wimbledon tennis champion Arthur Ashe and South Africa: 'The first free black man I'd ever seen'
Fifty years ago Arthur Ashe pulled off an amazing feat, upsetting the odds and becoming the first black man to win the Wimbledon Men's final when he beat fellow American Jimmy Connors - but it was not something he wanted to define his fight to break down barriers around racial discrimination was closer to his heart - and apartheid South Africa became one of his battle grounds."I don't want to be remembered in the final analysis for having won Wimbledon... I take applause for having done it, but it's not the most important thing in my life - not even close," he said in a BBC interview a year before his death in his Centre Court victory on 5 July 1975 was hailed as one of those spine-tingling sporting moments that stopped everyone in their tracks, whether a tennis fan or not, and it is being commemorated with a special display at the Wimbledon was already in his 30s, tall, serene and with a quiet and even-tempered demeanour. Connors, 10 years younger and the defending champion, was an aggressive player and often described as "brattish".Ashe's achievements and the skills and courage he displayed on the court were certainly matched by his actions off it. In the early 1970s, South Africa repeatedly refused to issue a visa for him to travel to the country alongside other US white-minority government there had legalised an extreme system of racial segregation, known as apartheid - or apartness - in authorities said the decision to bar him was based on his "general antagonism" and outspoken remarks about South in 1973, the government relented and granted Ashe a visa to play in the South African Open, which was one of the top tournaments in the world at the was Ashe's first visit to South Africa, and although he stipulated he would only play on condition that the stadium be open to both black and white spectators, it sparked anger among anti-apartheid activists in the US and strong opposition from sections of the black community in South journalist and tennis historian Richard Evans, who became a life-long friend of Ashe, was a member of the press corps on that South Africa says that Ashe was "painfully aware" of the criticism and the accusation that he was in some way giving legitimacy to the South African government - but he was determined to see for himself how people lived there."He felt that he was always being asked about South Africa, but he'd never been. He said: 'How can I comment on a place I don't know? I need to see it and make a judgment. And until I go, I can't do that.'"Evans recalls that during the tour, the South African writer and poet Don Mattera had organised for Ashe to meet a group of black journalists, but the atmosphere was tense and hostile."As I passed someone," Evans told the BBC, "I heard someone say: 'Uncle Tom'" - a slur used to disparage a black person considered servile towards white people."And then one or two very vociferous journalists stood up and said: 'Arthur, go home. We don't want you here. You're just making it easier for the government to be able to show that they allow someone like you in.'" But not all black South Africans were so vehemently opposed to Ashe's presence in the South African author and academic Mark Mathabane grew up in the Alexandra township - popularly known as Alex - in the north of Johannesburg. Such townships were set up under apartheid on the outskirts of cities for non-white people to first became aware of Ashe as a boy while accompanying his grandmother to her gardening job at a British family's mansion in a whites-only lady of the house gifted him a September 1968 edition of Life magazine from her collection, and there, on the front cover, was a bespectacled Arthur Ashe at the was mesmerised by the image and its cover line "The Icy Elegance of Arthur Ashe" - and he set out to emulate Ashe went on the 1973 tour, Mathabane had only one mission - to meet Ashe, or at least get close to opportunity came when Ashe took time off from competing to hold a tennis clinic in Soweto, a southern Johannesburg township. The 13-year-old Mathabane made the train journey to get there and join scores of other black - and mostly young - people who had turned out to see the tennis star, who they had given the nickname "Sipho"."He may have been honorary white to white people, but to us black people he was Sipho. It's a Zulu word for gift," Mathabane, now aged 64, told the BBC."You know, a gift from God, from the ancestors, meaning that this is very priceless, take care of it. Sipho is here, Sipho from America is here." The excitement generated at the Soweto clinic was not just contained to that township but had spread across the country, he rural reservations to shebeens or speakeasies (bars) - wherever black people gathered, they were talking about Ashe's visit."For me, he was literally the first free black man I'd ever seen," said the 1973 tour, Ashe went back to South Africa a few more times. In early 1976 he helped to establish the Arthur Ashe Soweto Tennis Centre (AASTC) for budding players in the not long after it opened, the centre was vandalised in the student-led uprisings against the apartheid regime that broke out in June of that remained neglected and in disrepair for several years before undergoing a major refurbishment in 2007, and was reopened by Ashe's widow Jeanne complex now has 16 courts, and hosts a library and skills development centre. The ambition is to produce a tennis star and Grand Slam champion from the township - and legends such as Serena and Venus Williams have since run clinics Mothobi Seseli and Masodi Xaba, who were once both South African national junior champions and now sit on the AASTC board, the centre goes beyond feel that fundamentally it is about instilling a work ethic that embraces a range of life skills and self-belief."We're building young leaders," Ms Xaba, a successful businesswoman, told the Seseli, an entrepreneur born and raised in Soweto, agrees that this would be Ashe's vision too: "When I think about what his legacy is, it is believing that we can, at the smallest of scales, move the dial in very big ways."Ashe was initially inclined to challenge apartheid through conversations and participation, believing that by being visible and winning matches in the country he could undermine the very foundation of the his experience within South Africa, and international pressure from the anti-apartheid movement, persuaded him that isolation rather than engagement would be the most effective way to bring about change in South became a powerful advocate and supporter of an international sporting boycott of South Africa, speaking before the United Nations and the US 1983, at a joint press conference set up by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and UN, he spoke about the aims of the Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid, which he had just co-founded with the American singer Harry Belafonte. The organisation lobbied for sanctions against the South African government, and at its height had more than 500 joined many protests and rallies, and when he was arrested outside the South African embassy in Washington DC in 1985, it drew more international attention to the cause and helped to amplify global condemnation of the South African was the captain of the US Davis Cup team at the time, and always felt that the arrest cost him his used his platform to confront social injustice wherever he saw it, not just in Africa and South Africa, but also in the US and was also an educator on many issues, and specifically HIV/Aids, which he succumbed to, after contracting the disease from a blood transfusion during heart surgery in the early he had a particular affinity with South Africa's black population living under a repressive said that he identified with them because of his upbringing in racially segregated Richmond in the US state of wonder then that Ashe was one of the key figures that South African anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela was keen to meet on a trip to New York, inviting him to a historic townhall gathering in 1990 shortly after his release from 27 years in pair met on a few occasions, however Ashe did not live to see Mandela become president of South Africa following the 1994 election, which brought in democratic rule and the dismantling of like Ashe, Mandela was able to use sport to push for change - by helping unify South Africa - notably during the 1995 Rugby World Cup when he famously wore the Springbok jersey, once a hated symbol of apartheid. To celebrate this year's anniversary of Ashe's victory, the Wimbledon Championships have an installation in the International Tennis Centre tunnel and a new museum display about him. They are also taking a trailblazer workshop on the road to mark his Wimbledon title was the third of his Grand Slam crowns, having previously won the US and Australian to many people like Mathabane - who in 1978 became the first black South African to earn a tennis scholarship to a US university - Arthur Ashe's legacy was his activism, not his tennis."He was literally helping to liberate my mind from those mental chains of self-doubt, of believing the big lie about your inferiority and the fact that you're doomed to repeat the work of your parents as a drudge," he said."So that was the magic - because he was showing me possibilities." You may also be interested in: 'I'm not afraid of dying': The pioneering tennis champion who told the world he had AidsArthur Ashe's 1976 interview: 'Fighting the myth''Growing up black' made Arthur Ashe crave control Go to for more news from the African us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica
BBC News
an hour ago
- BBC News
Ready for Euro 2025? Take our quiz
All eyes are on stunning Switzerland, as 16 teams battle it out to win Euro 2025, including Wales and defending champions England. But how much do you know about the tournament? Take our quiz and limber up for the football event of the summer. Written and produced by: Text Formats and Special Projects teams Designs by: Dan HagueImage credit: Getty Images
