… Opens investigation on Algerian Women’s national team
The Confederation of African Football (CAF) has reiterated its commitment to making the football environment safer and more inclusive by strengthening policies, enhancing collaboration with global partners and equipping its stakeholders with the tools needed to respond to evolving challenges.
“The level of participation and the quality of insights shared in the webinar reflect the growing commitment across our Member Associations and partners to prioritize safety and security in African football,” Christian Emeruwa, CAF’s head of safety and security, said during the CAF Continental safety and security stakeholders’ webinar on enhancing stadium safety.
According to Emeruwa, the webinar is more than just a meeting. He stated that the conference is a signal of the football governing body’s shared dedication to safeguarding the future of the game and protecting everyone who is part of it across the continent.
He disclosed that the virtual CAF safety and security webinar marks another important milestone in building a unified and resilient security framework across African football. Accordingly, the webinar brought together a wide array of stakeholders committed to enhancing safety and security standards within African football.
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The webinar served as a critical platform for knowledge exchange, policy alignment, and international collaboration. Participants included CAF safety and security officers, national safety and security officers, and club security officers from first division clubs across all 54 CAF Member Associations.
The main objectives were to review emerging safety and security challenges in African football, promote alignment of roles, responsibilities, and expectations across all stakeholder levels, share best practices and lessons learned from recent CAF competitions and reinforce the importance of planning, risk mitigation, and incident reporting.
Discussions around the future innovations and decentralisation strategies to strengthen local capacity within football were also held.
Key areas for alignment were around venue inspections, joint security meetings, command structures, roles, real-time response, reporting, escalation, documentation, evaluation and lessons learned, and capacity development through training and mentoring.
In addition to the core football security personnel, the conference had CAF and international guests, like: Samson Adamu, CAF director of tournaments & events division; Helmut Josef Spahn, FIFA director of safety, security and access; Stephen Furnham, head of UEFA safety and security operations national associations division; Brian Johnson, head of safety security & access, Asian Football Confederation; Valerio De Divitiis, head, UNOCT Programme on major sport security and prevention of violent extremism, and Massimiliano Montanari, CEO, International Centre for Sport Security.
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The session addressed emerging threats, global trends in event safety and best practices in stadium security and crowd management.
Similarly, the football governing body on Friday disclosed it has opened an investigation on the Algerian Women’s national team. In a statement released on Friday, CAF said there will be no further comment on the matter until the process is finalised.
“The Confederation of African Football (CAF) has opened an investigation against the Algerian Women’s National Team on alleged violations of the CAF Statutes and Regulations during the ongoing TotalEnergies CAF Women’s Africa Cup of Nations, Morocco 2024,” the statement reads.
