Features

African football will long remember 24 May 2021. Early that day, over a dozen CAF employees, many of them senior executives, learnt that they had lost their positions. No warning had been given. No explanation was provided.

Players, prosecutors, F.A. leaders and club officials reveal the unprecedented scale of match-fixing in Moldova. Josimar spoke to players who took part in the fixes and they tell a hallucinating story of how football corruption killed the beautiful game in Europe’s poorest country.

In public, Gianni Infantino has disowned the doomed European Super League project. But a confidential document seen by Josimar strongly suggests that, in private, he has encouraged it, and that Fifa has been playing a double game all along in order to extend its control over world football and weaken its greatest counter-power, UEFA.

Uefa awarded brutal dictator Alexander Lukashenko the hosting rights of the 2025 women’s U19 European Championship. According to Amnesty International, the government of Belarus is violating human rights on a scale not witnessed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Authorities persecute footballers who demand democracy.

Or: How to trick the world into believing it can stop worrying about Qatar’s migrant workers.

State-owned Qatar Airways is a FIFA partner and sponsor of the World Cup in Russia and Bayern Munich. Migrant workers at Hamad International Airport, which is owned by the airline, are being subject to major human rights abuse.

New Caf president Patrice Motsepe already has a nickname, “the new puppet of Zürich”. The Caf election demonstrated that African football is no longer in the hands of Caf, but controlled by Gianni Infantino himself.

In July of last year, a top Mauritanian club which had been defrauded by its own FA completed its 4-year long quest for justice when its claims were validated by the Supreme Court. Yet the man at the centre of the scandal, FA president Ahmed Yahya is allowed to stand in CAF presidential elections, with the blessing of Fifa. How can this be possible?

The twisted tale about how Caf lost a billion dollar deal – and why the cash-strapped organization wanted out of the deal, with Fifa’s blessing.

A suspended FA president is running unopposed. And why has Fifa’s Head of Member Associations Veron Mosengo-Omba travelled to Comoros in the middle of the pandemic to make sure the election goes ahead on 30 January?