CAF Opens AFCON Hosting Race for 2028, 2032 and 2036 as Four-Year Cycle Reshapes Bidding Landscape

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The Confederation of African Football has thrown open the hosting race for three editions of the Africa Cup of Nations, inviting all 54 member associations to bid for the 2028, 2032 and 2036 tournaments. AFCON's shift to a four-year hosting cycle and the bid hands CAF a decade of organizational and commercial certainty.

The invitation, issued alongside a bidding framework built with PwC and CAF's technical, financial and legal advisers, is pitched as a transparent, ethical process aligned with global best practice. By packaging three tournaments together, CAF is effectively creating a competitive marketplace for hosting rights, encouraging federations to plan infrastructure and government guarantees years in advance rather than scrambling edition to edition.

AFCON commands a cumulative global television audience exceeding 3.2 billion and more than six billion digital views, making it Africa's largest sporting property and a top-tier global event. For host nations, that reach translates into tourism, stadium, transport and investments - and a rare window of international visibility. For this same reason that drives competing bids elsewhere on the continent.

That competition is already live. The 2028 race has drawn a strong field, with Ethiopia filing early and a Southern African joint campaign led by South Africa - alongside Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia - also in contention, plus reported interest from Morocco, Egypt and Libya. Roughly seven countries have placed their names in contention across the three editions, and heavyweights like Nigeria are being urged to weigh a bid. Nations that miss out on 2028 now have two further targets in 2032 and 2036, lowering the cost of losing and widening participation.

The next marquee edition sets the bar. The TotalEnergies CAF AFCON PAMOJA 2027 runs from 19 June to 17 July 2027 across Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda - the tournament's first three-nation co-hosting, and a model that future bidders, particularly the Southern African countries, appear ready to replicate. Multi-nation hosting spreads infrastructure risk and cost, and CAF's openness to it may quietly reshape who can realistically compete.

CAF says further announcements on its national-team competition calendar will follow.