Follow all of The Athletic’s AFCON coverage here: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/tag/afcon-2025/
The fingers of Europe and Africa were almost touching and between them, at the end of a golden hour, the sun merged with the horizon.
With the sky turning from orange to purple, the serrated edges of Morocco’s extreme north became clearer.
The Port of Tarifa in Spain was getting smaller, yet it never disappeared. Laurie Lee described the town as “washed-up Africa” because of its proximity to the continent, which is just nine nautical miles away.
From the eastward-facing deck of the Balearia ferry, you could see the white cliffs of Gibraltar. There, you have warm beer, Marks & Spencer, red phone boxes and canons facing towards the invisible enemies.
On the other side, you could see Morocco, with Jebel Musa brooding and the sparsity of the Rif mountain range behind it, which forks sharply like a sheath of daggers.
Jebel Musa on Morocco’s northern coastline (Simon Hughes/The Athletic)
The Greeks and the Romans called these opposite peaks the twin pillars of Hercules. It was the end of the world, beyond which lay a void.
Today, it is the choke point separating the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea; a dangerous water of swollen currents, ship movements and sharks chasing in the slipstreams. Beneath, a gas line helps partly explain Morocco’s value to Europe.
It seemed like a good place to begin The Athletic’s coverage of the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations. Geographically, the tournament has never felt closer to the rest of the world, not since 1988, anyway, when Morocco last hosted.
On that occasion, only eight teams qualified and all the games were played in Casablanca and Rabat. This time, 24 nations are competing in Morocco and six cities are involved.
One of them is Tangier, a city as Moroccan as a lamb’s head seared and scraped onto bread, albeit one with an international outlook. From the avenues that sink towards the Mediterranean from Boulevard Pasteur, Europe is right there.
A beach in Tangier (Simon Hughes/The Athletic)
Yet it was once called the Interzone, a tag created by William Burroughs, one of many writers who based themselves in Tangier between 1923 and 1956, when it was governed by Western powers and became a magnet for artists and spies.
Burroughs, like many of Tangier’s famous foreign expats, was escaping a past, having killed his wife in Mexico City, where he was convicted of manslaughter in absentia with a suspended sentence.
In Tangier, he discovered a native quarter as a “maze of sunless, twisting streets and blind alleys”. There is always a sense that something is happening just beyond the shutters, or that something is going to happen, though it is not quite obvious what it is until it is in your face.
(Simon Hughes/The Athletic)
On this occasion, it is surely AFCON, a spectacle that Veron Mosengo-Omba, the secretary general of the Confederation of African Football (CAF), claimed on Tuesday, would be “the best edition ever” due to its “global” appeal and Morocco’s “world-class” infrastructure.
In 1988, AFCON seemed much further away but it has since become too big to ignore. Moments after The Athletic docked in Tangier’s port on Wednesday evening, CAF announced a “record-breaking” 20 media rights partnerships for the competition across more than 30 European territories. This came after a “landmark” agreement this month with Channel 4, which means all of its 52 matches will be on free-to-air television in the United Kingdom for the first time.
The broadcaster was not the only British company competing for this deal. In its press release, CAF nodded to Moroccan diasporas, explaining some of the wider interest, particularly in Spain. If that is the case, qualified nations with huge populations and significant communities abroad, such as Nigeria, Egypt and DR Congo, will also have contributed.
The attention surrounding AFCON also stems from the selection of high-level players from the most popular European leagues, including Mohamed Salah, who has placed himself in the spotlight recently with his comments rather than his performances, in case you hadn’t noticed.
If these leagues are defined as England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France, then 124 players from 62 clubs will be available for their countries in Morocco over the next month. For the record, two days before the opening ceremony in Rabat, a total of 45 Premier League players representing 14 clubs are present. And in descending order, there are 25 players from 15 Ligue 1 clubs, 21 players from 12 Serie A clubs, 17 players from 10 Bundesliga clubs and 16 players from 11 clubs in La Liga.
This, at the very least, will cause sideways glances from Europe, initially laced with some resentment depending on the fortunes of the weakened clubs. Yet Channel 4 took confidence from the figures towards the end of the last AFCON in February 2024, suggesting that viewers were continuing to engage because they were enjoying it.
A recap of what happened at that tournament in the Ivory Coast: when the hosts were humiliated 4-0 in their last group game by Equatorial Guinea, they were on the brink of elimination and needed favours from other countries to go through. In the meantime, they sacked their French coach Jean-Louis Gasset without knowing their fate. Somehow, they ended up winning the whole thing.
Football is at its best when it is pure, unscripted drama. Given that it is easier to predict who will win the Premier League, the Champions League and the European Championship, AFCON provides a sense of the unknown because the favourite seldom delivers when it matters. This tournament has not been ruined by monopolies.
No African nation has won a World Cup, so AFCON also takes on an extra significance because it is a tournament where palpable success feels realistic.
Ivory Coast celebrate their unlikely victory in 2024 (Fareed Kotb/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Yet a World Cup looming just around the corner does bring an extra dimension to this AFCON. History shows that African teams tend to do better on a global stage immediately after encouraging results on their own continent.
In 2002, Senegal finished as AFCON runners-up for the first time before then matching Cameroon’s achievement in 1990 of reaching the World Cup quarter-finals. Eight years later, Ghana did the exact same. In 2022, Morocco became the first African nation to reach the semi-finals of a World Cup having only reached the quarter-finals of AFCON, although that experience provided vital tournament exposure for some players who subsequently emerged as key men in Qatar.
With more African nations competing at the 2026 World Cup than ever before, the next month should provide a glimpse into the near future for a continent that has a deeper past than some of those that have overtaken it in other ways.
AFCON, which started in 1957, is only a year and a half younger than the European Cup/Champions League and is more than three years older than the European Championship, yet it has often been viewed outside of Africa as a disruptor because of the way it sometimes clashes with the calendars of competitions with more money behind them.
This year, AFCON begins a few days before Christmas for the first time because FIFA events occupy the summers of 2025 and 2026. We already have dates for the European Championship in 2028 and the World Cup two years later, but we don’t know exactly when the next AFCON will take place (even though it is scheduled for 2027), a fact that says much about the power CAF lacks compared to other federations.
It also helps explain why AFCON has easily been framed as an inconvenience for anyone who is not instinctively invested in it. It is here now, though. And if you cast it to one side, you are missing out.
Every football country claims to be mad about the sport but Morocco really is. As the sun set on Thursday evening, Morocco were playing against Jordan in the FIFA Arab Cup final, thousands of miles away in Qatar.
They’d sent a second string team because AFCON was starting in three days time, but if you assumed all of the country’s focus and energy would be around hosting responsibilities and the chance of winning the tournament for the first time since 1976, you’d be wrong.
All around Tangier’s medina, shop workers were following what was happening on their phones. Given the enthusiasm of the commentary, it sounded like the game was deep in injury time. It wasn’t. When Jordan took a 2-1 lead with 20 to go, the Moroccans in Cafe Tingis went berserk and it felt like arguments were breaking out everywhere. By the time I returned to my riad further into the medina, the scores were level again but I only knew that because of the noise rushing through the alleyways.
(Simon Hughes/The Athletic)
Morocco ended up winning the game 3-2 and it really did illustrate how narrowly we tend to see things in other parts of the world.