The Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) will take place between 21 December 2025 and 18 January 2026 in Morocco.<\/p>\n
The 2025 edition was originally due to be a mid-year tournament, to reduce scheduling conflicts with European clubs and competitions.<\/p>\n
The summer event was supposed to boost tourism and highlight what Morocco has to offer, before the country co-hosts the 2030 World Cup with Spain and Portugal.<\/p>\n
But it was shifted to December to make way for Fifa’s expanded Club World Cup, held in the summer.<\/p>\n
The move to a start in December rather than January will avoid conflicts with the Champions League and Europa League, which restart on 20 and 22 January respectively.<\/p>\n
It will be the first time Afcon has been held at this time of year, with matches played in Rabat, Casablanca, Marrakech, Agadir, Tangier and Fez.<\/p>\n
There will not be matches on 25 December.<\/p>\n
Players participating in Afcon were released from clubs on 15 December.<\/p>\n
This means teams have only had a week to prepare before the tournament begins, sparking anger from coaches who have been left with a short window in which to prepare their teams.<\/p>\n
Angola’s coach Patrice Beaumelle said the situation was “nonsense” and that “you can’t prepare a serious team in just two or three sessions”.<\/p>\n
The last time Afcon was held in summer was the 2019 edition, hosted by Egypt.<\/p>\n
In recent years, the tournament has been played between January and February.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) will take place between 21 December 2025 and 18 January 2026 in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":196337,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[85,46,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-196336","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196336\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}