everything is so wrong with WAFCON 2026

broadcast chaos, invisible coverage, and a player facing racist abuse

I was so excited to watch the tournament, and I still am, but for some reason, I can’t shake off the awkward fit that’s followed the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations (WAFCON) since it started.

As an African who follows football as both a fan and a writer, I knew WAFCON was starting this July. But with the World Cup wave that kept everyone in a frenzy, it’s understandable that some people forgot or never found out. I’ve always thought the tournament was starting at just the right time — a moment when new football fans, freshly acquired from the World Cup, were still looking for the next tournament to hold on to their new fandom. These felt like happy signs that WAFCON would finally get to ride on that momentum, since women’s football usually gets the scraps.

@shuta.bug x @cafwomenfootball on Instagram

It’s to my disbelief that the Confederation of African Football (CAF), or whoever is steering this, hasn’t fully tapped into that reality. One where there’s never been a more active time to push the tournament than now. The fact that it doubles as the African qualifier for the Women’s World Cup tells you everything you need to know: push it hard, put it in front of the world, while everyone is still watching.

They clearly missed it. And nowhere is that clearer than in what happened to Esther Okoronkwo. The Super Falcons forward called out theft at the team’s hotel, and the response was racist abuse flooding her page. That was a staggering thing that shouldn’t see the light of day in this day and age. But what’s just as telling is that this got treated with the same institutional shrug as everything else that’s gone wrong at this tournament. That’s the real problem. Nothing about WAFCON so far has been handled like it matters.

Take visibility as a case study here. CAF put out a list of channels and platforms broadcasting the tournament, and Channel 4 in the UK which was on that list didn’t show a glimpse of the opening match. As I write this, it still hasn’t. Culture keeps clamouring for gender equality and for women to be more visible in society, but when it’s time to actually do the work that backs that up, the decision-makers go slack. Scroll through the comments on CAF’s social media posts and you’ll find people in Mexico, Germany, Italy, and other non-African countries asking where they can even watch the tournament — the same momentum the organisers failed to build into their playbook. CAF has since tried to fix the UK viewing issue by streaming matches on YouTube via CAF TV. The question is, why wasn’t that the plan from the start, instead of an afterthought?

Then there’s the broadcast quality itself, and this is where it gets almost comedic. The opening match was an eyesore on my cable. The screen kept zooming in and out, with the picture shrinking and showing black box at the top and bottom, then back to full screen, and the problem was clearly coming from the source, not my end. By the time I sat down to write this two days after the opening match, the picture had improved, but the audio took a weird turn with a glitch so bad it can’t be ignored. The commentator’s voice was doubling into a muffled repeat of whatever he’d just said and this went uncaught throughout the halftime. I know DSTV is the major broadcaster for this game across Pan-African countries, so I can’t be the only one hearing it. Is that the standard we’re trying to portray to the world; watch the women’s game, sure, but don’t expect it to be handled like it matters the way the men’s game is?

It’s baffling that this wouldn’t happen at a men’s tournament. I’d bet more staff would be on the ground, covering every nitty-gritty position. AFCON was a spectacle watched by the world so why is its women’s equivalent dragging its feet like the tournament wasn’t already planned months in advance?

And this isn’t peculiar to Africa. It’s the stark reality of women’s football globally. Women are never thought of first and even when they are, it’s rarely at the same standard as their male counterparts.

Is Africa missing a big chance to showcase its women on a global stage, just like it did with the men at AFCON? Or are these just inevitable glitches that’ll get waved off as normal at the next press conference? Whatever answer they choose to swing with, we can’t deny that the World Cup had everyone in a chokehold, whether we liked it or not. And as that groundbreaking moment happened, the only question new fans were asking was: what’s the next tournament, season, match happening? That was the perfect question for CAF to answer with remarkable coverage and a full overhaul of WAFCON. And the fact that this is the biggest edition yet makes the failure beyond ignorance.