FotMatch Insights · HistoricalFrom Eight Teams to a Continental Powerhouse: How the Africa Cup of Nations Grew UpThe Africa Cup of Nations began in 1957 as a friendly tournament between four teams. By 2025 it is a biennial spectacle with twenty-four nations, billion-dollar broadcast deals, and the power to paralyse European leagues for a month every two years.By FotMatch Editorial Team · Updated 2026-05-06 · 6 min read

In February 1957, Egypt beat Ethiopia 4-0 in the final of the first Africa Cup of Nations, played in Khartoum with four participating teams and no commercial sponsors. In February 2024, Côte d'Ivoire won the tournament in front of 60,000 spectators in Abidjan, after twenty-four nations had competed in a competition broadcast to 150 countries and worth an estimated €200 million in television rights. The journey between those two moments is the story of African football's emergence as a global force.

The early years: politics, pan-Africanism, and limited footballThe Africa Cup of Nations was conceived in the political context of decolonisation. The Confederation of African Football (CAF) was founded in 1957 in Khartoum, Sudan, by the football associations of Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan, and South Africa — though South Africa was expelled in 1958 because its apartheid regime refused to field a multiracial team. The first tournament was as much a political statement as a sporting event: it demonstrated that African nations could organise international competitions independently of European colonial structures.The football was modest by modern standards. Egypt won the inaugural tournament with a squad drawn entirely from domestic clubs; there was no professional league in Africa at the time, and most players were amateurs who worked other jobs. The format was simple: four teams, two semi-finals, a final. It would take until 1962, when Ethiopia hosted and won, for the tournament to introduce a group stage — and even then, the group stage consisted of two groups of three, with the winners advancing directly to the final.The early tournaments were dominated by North African and West African teams. Egypt won the first two editions. Ghana, independent in 1957 and eager to project national identity through sport, won in 1963 and 1965 with a team that included Osei Kofi and Ibrahim Sunday. The pattern established early: African football produced extraordinary talent that the world rarely saw, because the infrastructure to export players to European leagues did not yet exist.

Expansion and the rise of the professional diaspora: 1968-1996The tournament expanded to eight teams in 1968, introducing quarter-finals for the first time. The format changes reflected the growth of CAF membership — by 1970, more than thirty African nations had football associations affiliated to FIFA — but also the increasing commercial viability of the competition. Ghana's third title in 1978, won on home soil in Accra, was the first tournament to attract significant regional broadcast interest.The 1980s and 1990s brought two transformative developments. The first was the emergence of the African professional diaspora in European football. Cameroon's 1990 World Cup squad, which reached the quarter-finals in Italy, included seven players based in France — most notably Roger Milla, who was 38 years old and became the tournament's iconic figure. The success of Cameroon, and of Nigeria's "Dream Team" that won the Olympic gold medal in 1996, demonstrated to European clubs that African players were not just physically gifted but tactically sophisticated enough to compete at the highest level.The second development was the expansion of the Africa Cup of Nations itself. The tournament grew to twelve teams in 1992, then sixteen in 1996 — the same year that CAF introduced a formal qualifying system with group stages, replacing the previous regional knockout rounds. The expansion was controversial. Critics argued that it diluted the quality of the tournament. Supporters countered that it was a necessary step toward the continental integration that the tournament had been founded to promote.

The 2010s: commercial breakthrough and European calendar conflictThe Africa Cup of Nations entered its commercial modern era in the 2010s. The 2012 tournament, co-hosted by Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, was the first to generate broadcast revenue exceeding €100 million, driven by deals with Canal Plus in Francophone Africa and SuperSport in Anglophone Africa. The 2015 tournament in Equatorial Guinea, controversially relocated from Morocco at short notice due to the Ebola outbreak, still generated €120 million.The growth created a structural tension with European club football. As African players became increasingly important to European clubs — by 2015, more than 350 African players were registered in the top divisions of England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain — the biennial scheduling of the Africa Cup of Nations in January and February became a source of conflict. European clubs lost their African players for three to five weeks during the critical mid-season period. The conflict peaked in 2022, when Liverpool lost Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mané for the tournament while competing for the Premier League title.CAF's response, implemented in 2019, was to move the tournament to June and July, aligning it with the European off-season. The move eliminated the club-versus-country conflict but created new problems: the tournament was now played in the rainy season in West Africa and in temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius in North Africa. The 2019 tournament in Egypt was the first under the summer schedule and required cooling breaks that slowed the tempo of matches.

The 2024 tournament: twenty-four teams and a new generationThe 2023 Africa Cup of Nations, played in Côte d'Ivoire in January and February 2024 after a one-year postponement, was the most commercially successful and competitively compelling edition in the tournament's history. Twenty-four teams competed in six groups of four, with the top two from each group and the four best third-placed teams advancing to a round of thirty-two — a format identical to the expanded FIFA World Cup. The tournament lasted thirty-four days and featured fifty-two matches.The quality was striking. The round of sixteen included traditional powers — Egypt, Nigeria, Morocco, Senegal — and emerging nations — Cape Verde, Mauritania, Namibia — that had never progressed beyond the group stage in previous editions. Nigeria, coached by José Peseiro, reached the final with a squad that included Victor Osimhen, the reigning African Footballer of the Year. Côte d'Ivoire, the host nation, won the tournament after sacking their manager midway through the group stage and replacing him with an interim coach, Emerse Faé. The final, watched by an estimated 1.2 billion viewers globally, was the most-watched Africa Cup of Nations match in history.The commercial metrics confirmed the tournament's growth trajectory. Total broadcast revenue was estimated at €220 million, a 65% increase from the 2019 edition. Social media engagement across CAF's official platforms exceeded 4 billion impressions during the tournament, driven by viral moments that transcended football and entered global popular culture. The Africa Cup of Nations was no longer a regional event. It was a global spectacle with African characteristics.

What the tournament means for African football's futureThe Africa Cup of Nations has become the primary vehicle through which African football projects its identity to the world. The tournament generates revenue that funds CAF's development programmes — youth academies, coaching education, women's football infrastructure — in nations that lack the domestic commercial base to support these activities independently. But it also concentrates resources in the hands of the tournament's organising committee and the host nation, creating inequality between countries that can afford to bid for and host the event and those that cannot.The diaspora dimension is equally complex. The tournament's global broadcast audience is driven largely by African communities in Europe, the Middle East, and North America, who watch matches that determine national pride and social status in ways that transcend sport. For a second-generation Nigerian in London or a Senegalese family in Paris, the Africa Cup of Nations is not entertainment; it is a connection to a homeland that may be visited only once every few years.The future challenge is sustainability. The twenty-four-team format requires host nations to possess twelve stadiums that meet FIFA standards — a threshold that only a handful of African countries can currently meet. The 2025 edition is scheduled for Morocco, which has invested heavily in stadium infrastructure. The 2027 edition will be co-hosted by Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, none of which currently has more than two FIFA-standard stadiums. Whether the tournament can continue to grow without outgrowing the continent that created it is the question that will define its next seven decades.