Marrakech – The African Union Commission has expressed profound gratitude to Morocco for its “exemplary” organization of the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON), marking the tournament as a continental showcase of logistical excellence.
Commission Chairperson Mahmoud Ali Youssouf applauded “the professionalism with which the competition was delivered” and commended Morocco’s “outstanding hospitality.” He extended appreciation to King Mohammed VI, as well as Morocco’s government and people, for hosting what he described as a memorable tournament.
“The successful hosting of AFCON once again reflects Africa’s growing capacity to stage world-class sporting events that unite the continent and inspire global admiration,” Ali Youssouf stated. He noted that “AFCON has once again demonstrated that the beautiful game is a powerful force for unity, bringing Africans together across cultures, borders, and generations.”
The Commission Chairperson attended the final match between Senegal and Morocco, describing it as “a fitting and memorable conclusion to the tournament” featuring “two formidable African teams of global stature.”
While acknowledging moments of tension that the bloc head labeled as “driven by passion,” he noted with satisfaction that “the spirit of sportsmanship and fair play ultimately prevailed.”
Under the floodlights of Morocco’s modern stadiums, the 35th edition of this prestigious continental tournament was a resounding success by every measure.
Speaking on Saturday at a press conference in Rabat, Patrice Motsepe, President of the Confederation of African Football (CAF), hailed Morocco’s hosting of AFCON 2025 as “the most successful edition in the tournament’s history.”
Motsepe pointed to the tournament’s outstanding footballing level and the widespread admiration it drew from global coaches and legends, while singling out the exceptional quality of infrastructure, transport networks, hotels, stadiums, and training facilities.
Speaking on behalf of CAF’s 54 member federations, he also extended formal thanks to King Mohammed VI, the Moroccan government and people, and Fouzi Lekjaa.
CAF credited Morocco’s organization, hospitality, and cultural warmth as decisive commercial drivers, underpinning a 90% revenue surge and expanding AFCON’s sponsor base from 17 partners in 2023 to a record 23 in Morocco 2025.
Morocco delivered unprecedented infrastructure for the competition. The country deployed nine state-of-the-art brand-new or upgraded stadiums, including Rabat’s 69,000-seat Prince Moulay Abdellah Stadium and the 75,000-seat venue in Tangier.
High-speed rail lines connected major cities, while renovated airports and 5G networks operated seamlessly throughout the tournament.
The tournament achieved record-breaking attendance. Over 729,000 fans attended group-stage matches, establishing the highest opening-round total in AFCON history. Local broadcasters reported near-full capacity at nearly every game.
AFCON 2025 became an African financial juggernaut. Prize distributions reached unprecedented levels, with the champion earning $11.6 million and even first-round exits receiving up to $1.3 million.
Match broadcasts were high-definition and uninterrupted, and pitches were immaculate despite winter rain. The local organizing committee worked beyond the normal limits, coordinating transportation, security, and media logistics at a level never seen in African football.
Even many critics of past AFCONs – where power outages and unpaved roads sometimes made headlines – found nothing to legitimately fault in Morocco’s performance.
Morocco faces scrutiny because Africa was not ‘meant’ to excel
In light of these successes, however, a chorus of skepticism arose. Some pundits expressed surprise – or thinly veiled disappointment – that Morocco’s AFCON did not conform to their nostalgic expectations of earlier tournaments.
Rather than confront their teams’ on-field shortcomings, several sought refuge in logistical critiques, attributing failure to travel arrangements, accommodation standards, or scheduling decisions – complaints that functioned less as substantive analysis than as post-hoc rationalizations for competitive defeat.
When articulated by non-Africans, cultural theorists would identify this reflex as the imperial gaze – a racialized regime of perception forged by white supremacy that insists Africa be rendered intelligible only through savagery, barbarism, chaos, primitiveness, irrationality, excess, disorder, and perpetual failure.
Within this optic, Africa functions as spectacle rather than subject: a stage for violence, incompetence, emotionalism, and breakdown, endlessly available to reaffirm European rationality, discipline, and moral superiority.
Order in Africa is thus treated as suspicious, efficiency as anomalous, and excellence as provocation. When African institutions operate with rigor, professionalism, and control, they rupture the colonial fantasy that Africa must perform dysfunction to remain legible.
What unsettles these observers is not mismanagement but its absence – the collapse of a hierarchy that required Africa to appear backward so that whiteness could continue to appear modern, authoritative, and supreme.
It is in this context that cultural studies further illuminate what might be called the “African exceptionalism trap.” Across decades of discourse, African dysfunction has been normalized, even aestheticized. Delays are reframed as context, chaos as vibrancy, and improvisation as authenticity.
This low-expectation framework is not imposed only by the West; it is internalized and reproduced within Africa itself. When Morocco delivers timeliness, order, and procedural discipline, it violates an informal cultural contract about what Africa is supposed to look like. The backlash emerges not because something went wrong, but because too much went right.
Also at the core of this backlash lies a phenomenon long documented in postcolonial scholarship: intra-peripheral rivalry. Formerly colonized societies do not measure themselves only against Europe; they measure themselves against one another.
Within this horizontal field of comparison, Morocco occupies a position that disrupts the inherited pattern. It is African, formerly colonized, yet institutionally coherent, administratively effective, and globally legible.
This combination disrupts a tacit equilibrium built on shared underperformance. When one peer “escapes the script,” resentment does not rise upward toward the former colonizer, but sideways toward the peer who has broken rank.
