They will be. Arab Cup doesn't start until December 1. Even if they are called in a week early, there's plenty of time. Ah right. I had read that and forgot.
Can you help clarify the qualification process for the single-elimination portion of CAF please? How did Nigeria get in over teams with more points in other groups like Burkina Faso and Madagascar?
The matches against the last place team in your group do not count. This decision was taken after Eritrea withdrew from the competition and one group was left with 5 teams while all the rest had 6. Nigeria drew Zimbabwe twice. That means they only got 2 of their points from the last place team. Most/many of the other teams got 6 points from playing their last placed teams. Burkina Faso, to use the most important and relevant example, beat Djibouti 4-1 and 6-0. But in the rankings for best second place teams, those matches are discounted (same thing happened for Madgascar with their games against Chad). So Nigeria benefited from performingly poorly against their last place opponents (or, if you like, better against their non-last placed opponents). But none of this would have been possible had Eritrea not withdrawn from the tournament. Eritrea staying in the competition would have definitely put Burkina Faso above Nigeria. And might have put Niger ahead of both teams (you'd need Niger to get 6 points off Eritrea AND to turn around goal difference).
Making side discussion where there really isn’t one… I wonder if there’s any talk about Burkina Faso really being screwed and having recourse. I’m sure there is domestically. By the rules written when the competition started, they’d have advanced. And even with the change of rules, they and Nigeria did nothing different. The Eritrea situation only ultimately affected Niger. So to change the rules to accommodate a team leaving the competition and ensuring another team (Niger) wasn’t adversely affected… but then to have that rule change actually change who goes through… that would be a tough pill to swallow if it was my team. I get this has been known since March, but still. Having the rule change alter qualification and not affect the team/group it was designed to level the playing field for is something. Of course if Nigeria got screwed after qualifying with the rule change, they’d have a very similarly justifiable complaint. Eritrea, man.
Incredible that this sort of rule isn’t written into the competition regulations from the start. It’s not like a CAF team withdrawing is some surprise or unforeseeable miracle, it happens almost every cycle.
Maybe it is? Not CAF but I remember North Korea withdrawing before. So yes, this happens. I think with the 48 team format this is the first time it’s happened and really clearly affected progression. And with teams that have nothing to do with it. I’m the past, group winners in CAF advanced to next round. So if you were in a group of 4 instead of 5, oh well. Getting to a stage of 36 teams, direct qualification being on the agenda, and the a team dropping out… that’s new.
Seems like CAF could come up with a formula to determine advancement just on that particular group that involved Eritrea rather than impact the entire qualifying table. Every one of these groups had a "lowest" seed in it. Maybe we don't expect Ertirea to advance but neither do we expect Seychelles (Gabon, who did advance to the next phase) or Djibouti (Burkina Faso's group) or Lesotho (which did surprisingly well in Nigeria's group). Burkina Faso scoring 21 points in the group and not advancing is crazy. Niger would end up tied with BF if you added the 6 points (from games forfeited by Eritrea) and then we're looking at goal difference. Both teams would have scored more points in that situation than Nigeria actually earned on the field. Perhaps even an average scoring system for the Morocco/Niger/Eritrea group works best. It seems wholly unfair to deduct an uneven amount of points across all of the 2nd place teams. BF earned 6, Nigeria earned 2 points. Not to mention that Benin went into the final match round in 1st place and dropped a 4-0 game to Nigeria, allowing both South Africa and Nigeria to jump over them in the table. There's a whole lot of conspiracy/corruption theories one could dream up in this.
But hasn’t the “drop the games against the worst team” policy been pretty common in qualifiers where groups don’t have the same number of teams? I know UEFA have done this. Changing the rules on the fly is obviously not ideal, but at least in a vacuum I don’t know if there’s a single right answer here.
The biggest issue I see is that it could give teams an incentive to lose a match. Imagine a situation where Team A is already locked into 2nd place heading into the final matchday, they can’t reach 1st place and they can’t fall to 3rd. Imagine they are playing Team B that currently sits in 6th (last) place, but who they already beat in the reverse fixture. Now imagine the Team C in 5th place got good results against Team A, including at least one win plus something else (another win, a draw, or a sizable goal difference; let’s say a draw for this example). In this situation, it benefits the Team A if Team C finishes in last place because even the three points they already have against Team B are better than the one point they have against Team C. Therefore, it benefits Team A to deliberately lose to Team B to allow Team B to leapfrog Team C at the bottom of the table. There’s a kind of similar problem in UEFA qualifying right now where San Marino, irrelevant as this may be, have an incentive to lose to Romania so that Romania qualify for the playoff round by being a second-place team instead of hogging one of the Nations League lucky-loser spots, which could then trickle down to San Marino instead (having won their Nations League D group). Luckily it’s just San Marino in this case and not actually a team that could win anyways, but it’s terrible design. These formats where we are comparing multiple teams from the same group against multiple teams from other groups are very delicate in this way; they must be designed carefully to prevent these perverse incentives. And UEFA / CAF / FIFA dropped the ball massively here.
Yes. The Nations League stuff tied in with qualifying in UEFA has already exposed some absurdities and it's still relatively new. There will be a disaster there one day. And beating my drum on CAF, the Eritrea decision was one thing but there were probably no good options. The worse decision was staggering MD10. Absolutely nothing would have prevented CAF from decreeing that MD9 was on Friday and MD10 was on Tuesday, so you could have simultaneous kickoffs for any match that mattered. The staggering of matches across all possible days during a window is also a relatively new phenomenon and done for television purposes. I get it and I'm not opposed to it. But you can revert to the norm on the final two matchdays to secure competition integrity. Nothing happened this time, it appears, but the possibilities for screwing around with goal difference are so obvious.
Looking ahead to next month, I’m really fascinated by who the AFC decides to appoint to their 5th Round matches, a home-and-home between UAE and Iraq for a spot in the intercontinental playoff. I think the appointment will serve as a very easy-to-read barometer for the level of political influence in the continent, here’s why: Looking at the AFC World Cup shortlist found here (https://refereeingworld.blogspot.com/2024/02/fifa-world-cup-2026-candidate-referees.html?m=1), there really aren’t a whole lot of names you’re excited about to put on two of the biggest matches in the continent over 4 years. If you’re asking me to pick 2 referees for these games, putting politics aside, I think it’s really easy: Al-Kaf and Faghani. Mayhe throw in Makhadmeh into there too, I haven’t seen enough of a sample size on him. The problem for Al-Kaf and Faghani is that politics could easily block one or both of them. Al-Kaf’s Oman was just beaten by UAE to eliminate them from World Cup Qualifying; will the AFC face pressure to leave him out of these delicate matches for that reason? For Faghani, the situation is worse: he faced a big controversy the last time he saw Iraq, at the R16 in the 2023 Asian Cup. He sent off an Iraqi player, and Faghani faced such a big response from the Iraqi media that the AFC had to specifically condemn the backlash and Australian police had to become involved to protect his family. Iran and Iraq is a contentious rivalry on and off the pitch anyways. Furthermore, the Iraqi FA issued a statement after Round 4 politely calling the AFC corrupt for their decision to host those games in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. I would be quite surprised to see Faghani on either of these games given the current backdrop; however, if he is, the AFC would deserve praise for making the most apolitical appointment in football history. I think AFC’s next-best options would be reusing some the better-performing referees from Round 4, namely Makhadmeh and maybe Araki (who at least nothing egregiously wrong in a nothing game). Tantashev performed poorly and should be left out. However, all those referees already saw UAE or Iraq in that round, so there might be some desire to look somewhere else. And that’s where it gets really bad. If AFC doesn’t even feel they can repeat a referee on the same team, and doesn’t think Faghani and/or Al-Kaf are tenable, we’re at the worst-case scenario. They could reuse Ma Ning from Round 4 (having seen neither of these teams), but the performance really doesn’t justify it. And if they want to exclude all referees from Round 4 entirely, then they’re really digging deep. We’d probably be looking, fittingly, at a Qatari (Falahi) and a Saudi (Al-Turais? Al-Hoish?) as the next men up. If those are the final two assignments, that would really be the cherry on top, wouldn’t it?
Africa Nigeria-Gabon: Abongile Tom (rsa) Cameroon-DRC: Mahmood Ismail (sdn) Final: Jalal Jayed (mar) Asia UAE-Iraq playoff series First leg: Shaun Evans (aus) Second leg: Yusuke Araki (jpn) With the exception of Jayed, in favour with FIFA and building up experience towards the next WC, overall the theme of these appointments is that neither CAF or AFC are risking big names here. The clearest signal towards that is chosing Evans, not even pre-selected by FIFA, instead of Faghani.
I was about to ask "who?" in relation to Tom and then quickly googled to find this: https://www.kickoff.com/world-news/...-abongile-tom-decision-for-world-cup-play-off So that's fun. There's a lot of stuff percolating in Nigerian and social media on this already. But to the point, is he the #1 in South Africa now? I see he went to CAN 2023 but I haven't even noticed him. Age 33 with one major tournament under his belt is something, though. And, yeah, Evans is an interesting way to solve the dilemma AFC and FIFA had there.
In principle, Tom has a good style (communicative with players) and is ready to show cards when needed, but to me he comes across as a bit too uncertain and shy in making decisions.
I actually think Evans is quite a decent referee (granted, not a huge sample size there) and given the state of Asian refereeing, would probably be in the mix for the World Cup himself if Faghani wasn’t Australian. So I think it’s a good compensation for him, and really not surprised to see Faghani left out given the background I described above. Araki’s appointment to me reads like something between a reward and a true test to prove himself, after the nothingburger of a game that was Qatar vs Oman. Very interested to see Jayed in that African Final. I’ve only seen highlights of his work at the U20 World Cup, my impression was that he moves well and seemed very intense, almost to a fault.
Is there any reason CAF couldn’t / shouldn’t have switched those semifinal appointments? This seems easily foreseeable and preventable.
How is it possible that Tom can squeeze a ball just before halftime, determine that it’s flat, and then do the same thing less than a minute into the second half without the issue having been correctly? This is an amateurish look for CAF.
5 minute long video review process for the world’s most obvious penalty kick for holding and somehow he comes away with no foul, my word this is ugly. (52nd minute is when it starts for those curious)
Really long VAR review in the Nigeria v. Gabon match. resulted in a CK. The holding was very clear but the referee must've concluded the player couldn't reach the ball, so no impact.
Which would be a crazy conclusion. The player almost reached the ball anyways, despite his jersey being pulled the whole time!
Meanwhile I think Evans looked really good in UAE vs Iraq, highlighted by excellent work in additional time: 90’+4’ he spots what would be a foul by Iraq on a UAE corner, but before doing anything else he clearly signals that the restart is a corner kick because the ball was not yet in play, and has a very stern word with the defender, excellent management 90’+5’ really great positioning to clearly see no penalty on the UAE attacker, and sells it very well. 90’+6’ very good offside by AR2 to disallow UAE goal I stand by what I said earlier that Evans would be definitely going to the World Cup if not for Faghani’s change in association, and I really think he should be going anyways. He’s much better than some of the other contenders in Asia.
I'm not watching but just saw this grainy highlight. I should wait for better footage but, ... isn't this obviously an APP foul on Gabon? Like it seems as if the Nigerian defender would head it cleanly away, gets pushed in the back as he leaps, and so heads it poorly to the Gabonese winger? It’s a shame really !!! pic.twitter.com/m11djF4AMV— Samson Babajide Fayoyiwa (@Emperorpapillo) November 13, 2025 Am I seeing it wrong? Or is this a case of the VAR threshold being very high in the game and it probably a very good thing that there wasn't an intervention here?
You might be unintentionally damning him with faint praise there. I agree he's better. But the competition is awful. From the limited input I get from the A-League, there seems to be a lot of complaints about him and Faghani domestically, though. Perhaps just sour grapes from partisans and maybe he just referees better internationally (see: EPL, almost everyone). But I'm also not convinced Evans is world-class elite, based on what I've seen either.
Notable that Mahmood Ismail is joined by two Kenyan assistant referees, as opposed to the Sudanese assistants he worked with in Libya vs Cape Verde where AR1 had a very impactful wrong offside flag late on. Omar Artan is the 4th