SuperSport secures all 34 matches as CAF expands Women's AFCON to 16 teams
The Confédération Africaine de Football has awarded CANAL+ exclusive broadcast rights across Sub-Saharan Africa for the TotalEnergies CAF Women's Africa Cup of Nations Morocco 2026, putting all 34 matches of the tournament on SuperSport.
Where to watch Women’s AFCON?
The agreement covers CANAL+'s full Access tier, DStv, DStv Stream, GOtv and GOtv Stream - meaning the newly expanded, 16-team edition of the competition will be available well beyond the premium bouquets that have historically carried CAF's flagship men's tournaments.
The competition opens in Rabat on Sunday, with Algeria facing Senegal at the Olympic Stadium at 18h00 local time (17h00 GMT), followed by hosts Morocco against Kenya at Moulay El Hassan Stadium at 21h00 local time (20h00 GMT). The final on August 16 carries a prize money of USD 2 million for the winners - a record for the competition.
Putting the entire tournament on the Access tier rather than a premium package is the more interesting part of this deal. CAF and CANAL+ have spent years treating the women's game as an add-on to bouquets built around the men's Champions League and AFCON. Here, the entry-level tier gets the whole thing - every match, not a curated highlights package or a handful of marquee fixtures. That's a long-term views that GOtv households, the broadcaster's largest and lowest-spend subscriber base across the continent, are where the audience for women's football actually sits, not just the DStv Premium households that skew toward European club football.
It also reflects what CAF is trying to build with the expanded format itself. Doubling the tournament from its previous size to 16 teams while doubling down on prize money only pays off commercially if broadcast reach matches the ambition. A tournament that big, sitting behind a narrow distribution window, would have undercut the point of expanding it in the first place. CANAL+ getting exclusivity in exchange for Access-tier carriage suggests both parties concluded that volume of viewers now matters more than premium positioning. This is a reasonable trade when the goal is building a women's football audience from a much smaller base than the men's game already has.
The risk sits with exclusivity itself. Handing the entire tournament to one broadcaster, with no terrestrial or free-to-air simulcast mentioned in the announcement, still caps the audience at CANAL+ subscribers in markets where pay-TV penetration remains uneven. CAF is trading maximum reach for guaranteed rights revenue and a committed broadcast partner - a fair exchange at this stage of the competition's growth, but one that leaves real audience upside on the table.
