Confederation of African Football

The Confédération Africaine de Football (English: African Football Confederation), (Arabic: الاتحاد الإفريقي لكرة القدم‎) is the administrative and controlling body for African football. It is almost always referred to by its acronym CAF (usually pronounced /kæf/).

CAF represents the national football associations of Africa, runs continental national and club competitions, and controls the prize money, regulations and media rights to those competitions.

CAF is one of the biggest of six continental confederations of FIFA. Although it is just three years younger than the UEFA, CAF still has a long way to go in order to improve the quality of the national and local competitions, and therefore, overcome a lot of naturally occurring obstacles, or other burdens such as; limited resources and either complete or partial lack of infrastructures, besides the high cost of transportation through different sides of the continent. Nevertheless, Africa produced skilled players and teams that match, and sometimes exceed Europeans, but, these isolated cases should not be self-deceptive into believing that Africa have achieved European standards in all the domains of football. CAF has been given 5 slots out of the 32 available since the 1998 FIFA World Cup in France and increased to 6 in 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa.

CAF was founded on 8 February 1957 in Khartoum, Sudan by the Egyptian, Ethiopian, South African and Sudanese FAs, following former discussions between the Egyptian, South African and Sudanese FAs earlier in 7 June 1956 in Avenida Hotel in Lisbon, Portugal. The headquarters were few months in Khartoum until a fire outbreak in the offices of the Sudanese Football Association when the organization moved to Cairo. Youssef Mohammad was the first General Secretary and Abdel Aziz Abdallah Salem the president. Its administrative center since 2002 is in 6th of October City, Cairo. It was initially made up of 4 national associations. Currently there are 55 associations, 53 full members beside Réunion Island and Zanzibar as associates. (see the bottom of this page or List of CAF national football teams).