Spread misleading information targeting Morocco winning the 1976 African Cup

Should Morocco also repeat its title as champion of the 1976 African Cup of Nations? This is what hundreds of posts on social media are demanding, incorrectly claiming that the Moroccan national team players left the field, similar to what the Senegalese did this year, during the final match during which they were crowned champions of the continent fifty years ago.

This misleading information spread like wildfire on the Internet, especially in Africa, after the decision taken by the Confederation of African Football (CAF), in mid-March, to withdraw the 2025 African Cup of Nations title from Senegal.

The body supervising African football considered that the temporary departure of Senegal players from the field, in protest against two referee decisions, constitutes a withdrawal from the competition. It therefore decided to declare Morocco, their opponent in that final match, the winner of the title.

In parallel with this decision, which was poorly received on the African continent, a large number of Internet users on “Facebook”, “Tik Tok” and “X” believe that the Moroccan national team behaved in the same way during the “final” of the 1976 African Cup of Nations (it was the last match in the final round that was held in the unified group system), after Guinea opened the scoring, without being subjected to any penalty.

A post on Facebook on March 18 that garnered more than nine thousand likes and 1,600 shares said: “By leaving the field and then returning to play, Morocco won its only title in the African Cup of Nations in 1976.”

One of the Internet pioneers commented: “We will take out the archives, and in the end they will have zero titles.”

Some publications go so far as to say that their opponent at the time, the Guinea national team, filed an appeal to regain their “stolen” victory.

Several sports media outlets also republished this false information, before quietly withdrawing it from their websites in some cases, or publishing a correction and apology in other cases.

And for good reason: these allegations are completely false, as confirmed to AFP by a number of direct sources.

Due to the absence of a complete recording of the match that can be viewed online or in an available archive, Agence France-Presse turned to witnesses from that era and contacted Sherif Soumaila, who won the African Golden Ball in 1972 and scored the only goal for Guinea in the match on March 14, 1976.

The 82-year-old confirmed categorically that his Moroccan rivals did not leave the field at any point during the match: “This is not true!”