Marrakech – From prime-time news bulletins to front-page headlines, from state television monologues to social media amplification, the Algerian media apparatus turned AFCON 2025 into something far more corrosive than a football tournament.
It ceased to be a sporting moment and became a political instrument – narrative warfare staged as commentary and analysis. The language was neither spontaneous nor careless; it was measured, rehearsed, and precise. “Divine justice.” “Biased refereeing.” “A manipulated tournament.” “A corrupted host.” Each phrase was deployed with intent, not to explain events but to overwrite them.
Algerian media hostility toward Morocco did not begin with the AFCON 2025 final – it merely found in it an occasion. In moments of Moroccan “setback,” long-held antagonisms surface with renewed clarity, confirming the old proverb: one people’s misfortune is another’s gain. What unfolded was not reporting shaped by circumstance, but animosity waiting for opportunity.
📷 الجزائريون يخرجون للاحتفال بهزيمة المخزن الذي حرم شعبه من الفرحة لينقذ عرشه بتشويه بطولة كأس أمم إفريقيا بمهازل تحكيمية pic.twitter.com/6yfDhhywo5
— Télévision Algérienne-التلفزيون العمومي الجزائري (@entv_dz) January 19, 2026
These were not fringe voices. They were mainstream headlines in outlets such as El Khabar, Echorouk, and Ennahar, echoed and endorsed by Algeria’s state television, whose main news anchor described Morocco’s defeat as a moral reckoning, explicitly celebrating the loss of “the Makhzen,” a term deliberately chosen not to describe a football federation, but a political system.
When a national broadcaster frames a football result as punishment for a neighboring state, the game has already been abandoned.
What followed the AFCON final in Rabat was not an analytical debate but insinuative incitement. The Algerian public was told – repeatedly – that Morocco’s entire tournament run had been lubricated by favoritism, that referees were bent, VAR was coerced, and CAF itself was complicit. The penalty incident was not discussed as a debatable call; it was elevated into proof of a grand design. A single moment was inflated into a mythology.
State TV went further. The anchor openly claimed that Algerians had taken to the streets to celebrate Morocco’s loss, not Senegal’s victory – an extraordinary admission that the emotional center of the coverage was not football excellence, but Moroccan failure.
And it did not begin with the final whistle. Algerian media hostility preceded the tournament itself – during the bidding process, the infrastructure inspections, the stadium inaugurations. Moroccan facilities were dismissed as “Photoshop or illusions.” Delays were predicted with near-desire. The narrative of inevitable Moroccan failure was prepared well in advance, so that if Morocco succeeded, it could only be because of manipulation.
Once Morocco demonstrated its capacity to host with discipline and coherence, the terms of judgment quietly inverted. What had been visible competence was reinterpreted as coercion, what functioned smoothly was recast as dominance, and what followed the rules was suspected precisely because it did.
For years, every Moroccan breakthrough on the continental stage has been followed by the same tired refrain: backstage deals, hidden hands, conspiracies whispered in corridors. The narrative is familiar and comforting to those unwilling to accept performance on merit.
When Morocco advances, the story is rarely about tactics, preparation, or execution – it is about unseen manipulation. Conspiracy-driven narratives thrive precisely because they require no verification. They feed on emotional readiness rather than evidence, gaining traction in moments of collective catharsis, when frustration and disappointment lower the threshold for belief.
The AFCON 2025 final should have buried that mythology. Instead, it exposed something far more troubling.
This was not a case of Morocco winning convincingly and rivals searching for excuses. Had Senegal dominated, won 3-0, and lifted the trophy through clean, uninterrupted football, the debate would have ended at analysis and self-criticism. Morocco would have been expected to regroup, improve, and move on. But what unfolded in Rabat was not a sporting defeat – it was a procedural rupture.
The temporary withdrawal of Senegalese players from the pitch – followed by a prolonged stoppage, a collapse of order in the stands, and the match drifting into a security void – did not merely “interrupt” the final; it profaned it.
It bent the contest out of its lawful shape and replaced sport with brinkmanship, as if a championship could be paused, pressured, and resumed at convenience. The psychological conditions of play were warped beyond recognition, and the ensuing chaos was not an unfortunate backdrop – it became part of the competitive reality imposed on the host.
Merit was put on trial without evidence
And let’s be plain: the injustice here was not borne by the champions. It was visited upon the hosts, in their own house, at the tournament’s most solemn hour – by conduct that felt less like a protest and more like a mutiny. It was a spectacle of defiance, a relapse into disorder, an affront to the very notions of discipline and fair contest – leaving behind the bitter impression that Senegal did not simply seek to win, but to overawe the match itself.
The focus was not confined to the abnormality of a final that slipped outside the normal grammar of football. In much of the international chatter – particularly across social media and partisan commentary – the narrative took a darker, more familiar turn. Refereeing bias was hastily alleged. Moroccan “influence” was invoked with knowing nods, as if success itself were incriminating.
Were Morocco’s recent victories also paid for? Can Morocco’s recent victories be retroactively re-litigated, stitched together into a convenient mythology of backstage engineering? Was the U-20 World Cup title purchased, the CHAN 2024 triumph scripted, each qualification pre-arranged in some hidden ledger?
Should the rise to eighth in the FIFA rankings be insinuated as something brokered rather than earned? If every Moroccan advance is suspect and every success contrived, then what are we to make of years of consistent results across competitions – coincidence, or simply excellence that refuses to fit a comforting conspiracy?
In this telling, Senegal was cast as a latter-day avatar of 1960s Africa – pure, resistant, standing upright against a supposed new order – while Morocco was painted as a neo-imperial actor, fluent in institutions, comfortable with power, and therefore illegitimate by default. It was an old reflex dressed in contemporary language: the successful African state recoded as the problem, the efficient as the conspirator, the organized as the oppressor.
Football analysis dissolved into postcolonial allegory, where matches were no longer played on grass but inside inherited resentments, and where merit was the only explanation rigorously excluded.
AFCON unmasked discomfort with Morocco’s ascendancy
What makes the Algerian media response particularly revealing is not its anger, but its consistency. The same outlets that accused Morocco of manipulating referees during AFCON were the same ones that, weeks earlier, blamed Morocco for Algeria’s quarterfinal exit against Nigeria – despite Algerian players themselves acknowledging Nigeria’s superiority.
As King Mohammed VI once observed, “May God increase our detractors, for the abundance of envy is proof of abundant achievement and prosperity; those who possess nothing inspire no envy at all.”
The reaction to the AFCON 2025 final cannot be dismissed as a regional media backlash. To read the coverage through such a narrow lens would be analytically lazy, obscuring the wider convergence of interests, anxieties, and narrative alignments that surfaced in its aftermath.
In fact, it revealed a broader alignment of discomfort among actors unsettled by Morocco’s altered position in the post-Françafrique order. Algerian media did not operate in isolation. Its framing resonated – sometimes strikingly – with themes long present in segments of the French political-media ecosystem historically uneasy with Morocco’s growing autonomy.
This convergence does not require coordination to be effective. It operates through shared interests and parallel anxieties.
Morocco today no longer fits the traditional French mental map of North Africa: a junior partner, strategically useful yet ultimately manageable. Over the past decade, Rabat has moved from accommodation to assertion – redefining its African policy, diversifying alliances, and positioning itself as a security, economic, and intelligence actor in the Sahel and Atlantic Africa.
As France’s influence receded country by country – from Mali to Burkina Faso to Niger – Morocco maintained functional relations across the region, often without the ideological baggage that now encumbers Paris.
This shift matters. Influence once exercised almost exclusively through Paris is now mediated, negotiated, and at times constrained by Rabat. Morocco no longer receives policy; it shapes terms.
At this juncture, Algerian media narratives found an unexpectedly receptive echo. French outlets that questioned Morocco’s internal symbolism during AFCON – speculating about royal protocol, reading institutional continuity as instability, and amplifying doubts about state presence – mirrored talking points already circulating in Algerian discourse.
The fact that the opening ceremony was led by Crown Prince Moulay Hassan and the final ceremony by Prince Moulay Rachid was read not as constitutional normalcy, but through the familiar trope that King Mohammed VI was absent, incapacitated, or politically withdrawn – a narrative long recycled whenever Morocco asserts visibility on its own terms.
Here, the overlap is instructive. Algerian media hostility provided raw material; certain French analytical traditions – still shaped by postcolonial reflexes – provided amplification. This did not amount to a unified front, but to a temporary alignment shaped by shared discomfort with a Morocco that, as Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita has previously said, is no longer yesterday’s Morocco – and no longer willing to remain subordinate.
This helps explain the paradox of the moment. Even as official Franco-Moroccan relations improved, including France’s recognition of Morocco’s position on the Sahara, parts of the French strategic and media establishment appeared unsettled. Diplomatic rapprochement does not automatically recalibrate institutional habits or elite worldviews formed over decades.
The common denominator was not ideology but loss of monopoly – over influence, over interpretation, over who sets the agenda in Africa.
In that sense, the media storm following the final was less about ninety minutes of football than about a reordered hierarchy. When power shifts, explanation often gives way to suspicion. And when autonomy replaces dependency, those accustomed to managing outcomes begin to question the rules themselves.
Morocco did not merely host AFCON 2025. It hosted the visible proof that it no longer needs permission to matter – and that realization disquieted, unnerved, and unmoored more than one capital.
A recent investigative report aired on France 2 has detailed how Algerian intelligence services operate on French soil by leveraging networks within the Franco-Algerian diaspora, particularly individuals active in politics, media, and civic life.
Through pressure, inducement, and coercion – often mediated via consular channels – these actors are used to relay narratives, influence debate, and monitor dissent, turning identity and proximity into instruments of foreign state influence.
Morocco’s media model needs a reset
AFCON 2025 thus became more than a football tournament; it was a deliberate stress test. For Morocco, it functioned as a rehearsal for the 2030 World Cup – revealing not only logistical and security lessons, but the centrality of narrative control. The tournament exposed how, absent a robust media and communication ecosystem, organizational excellence alone can be diluted, distorted, or erased altogether.
With the World Cup only a few years away, a central question looms: can Morocco translate global attention into lasting economic advancement? The challenge is not visibility, but narration. Without a media model capable of projecting Morocco coherently onto the world stage, even unprecedented exposure risks passing without strategic gain.
Morocco’s growing stature as a continental leader demands a media strategy that matches its diplomatic ambitions. For too long, the kingdom has relied on outdated, state-centric models of communication that no longer serve its interests. As Morocco deepens its footprint across Africa, it is in dire need of a powerful, pan-African media conglomerate.
Qatar understood early on that soft power lies in narrative control. Al Jazeera was never just a news channel. It was and remains a geopolitical weapon. Morocco, which now chairs international councils and leads in religious diplomacy and regional mediation, deserves nothing less. And if Qatar can dominate the Middle East’s media space from within, why should Africa’s story be outsourced to legacy platforms rooted in Paris?
One voice from within is worth more than ten from the outside – and Morocco is the most credible candidate to carry that voice forward. King Hassan II understood the power of the microphone better than anyone. As Moroccan journalist and royal chronicler Mohammed Saddik Maaninou recounts, during an Arab summit held in Fes in the 1980s – likely centered around King Fahd’s proposal for Palestine – Hassan II anticipated the likely outcome: that Arab leaders would walk out complaining the summit failed to produce results.
So, while the meeting was still underway, he stepped out, gave a carefully crafted press statement on the event, and had it broadcast immediately. By the time other leaders emerged from the room, the media had already framed the meeting through the lens of Hassan II’s message. His statement became the version of record. It was a bold exercise in narrative preemption that left no room for rival interpretations.
His decision to appoint Driss Basri as both Interior and Information Minister sent the same message: control the message, control the momentum. The media is not an accessory. It is a tool of governance. Morocco knew this once. It cannot afford to forget it now.
Today, Morocco doesn’t need a replica of Al Jazeera, but it does need something built for Africa and led by Africa. We do need something that speaks to our reality and vision. A large-scale, multilingual, pan-African media holding – spanning television, digital, investigative journalism, and cultural storytelling – would reinforce Morocco’s leadership where it matters most: hearts, minds, and narratives.
An Africa-centered media conglomerate backed by Moroccan capital and editorial direction would serve as a tool of parallel diplomacy, complementing our economic and political expansion across the continent. We don’t need merely a Moroccan Arabic broadcaster, but a multilingual network that reaches West, East, Francophone, and Lusophone Africa.
This would also break the lingering monopoly of postcolonial platforms like Jeune Afrique which still view Africa through a filtered, tainted lens of post-imperial France. Morocco has never truly belonged to the Middle East, nor should it mimic the pan-Arab media model. It has never truly identified with the pan-Arab project. Its real power lies in the continent it’s helping shape. It’s time the media reflected that. It should build its own. Confident, independent, African.