By Abby Douglas, Staff writer
On Tuesday, November 11, the African country of Morocco was expelled from the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations. The Africa Cup is the continent’s largest and most competitive soccer tournament. It is a biennial championship between 16 teams from many African countries scheduled to take place from January 17 to February 8, 2015.
Morocco was originally scheduled to be the host of the 2015 Africa Cup, but it attempted to postpone the tournament by six months or a year in order to decrease the threat of the Ebola virus to the Cup’s thousands of participants and attendees. This attempted postponement resulted the Confederation of African Football’s expulsion of Morocco both from the position of host country and the privilege of sending a team to represent the country in the Africa Cup.
Morocco was expelled from the tournament due to the Confederation of African Football’s accusation that Moroccan officials were being “alarmist” in attempting to push the Cup back to a later date. According to the New York Times, a postponement of the championship could potentially be financially crippling to the regional soccer governing body.
Currently, the Ebola virus has not reached Morocco, though it is relatively close to the countries of West Africa where the virus has reached catastrophically epidemic levels. The countries of Western Sahara and Mauritania lie between Morocco and Senegal, Mali, and Guinea, three countries either very recently declared Ebola-free, at high risk of Ebola, or currently facing an Ebola outbreak.
Even so, Moroccan soccer officials remain worried about the possibility of Ebola spreading to their country through the Africa Cup. They firmly refused to host the tournament championships at the scheduled time in January 2015.
The West African countries with the largest outbreaks of Ebola are Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. These countries have participated in the Africa Cup in previous years, but no teams from any of these countries have qualified to compete in 2015. Liberia’s soccer team has already been eliminated in preliminary rounds. Sierra Leone is still in the running, but their team is less likely to qualify because it is in last-place in its group. Guinea, however, has a team tied for third in its group that has the chance to qualify later this month.
In the months since the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, these countries have faced issues surrounding their soccer teams playing in other places. Sierra Leone in particular experienced brutal discrimination against their soccer team when they played in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as well as in Cameroon. While Sierra Leone’s team was on the field, a chant of “Ebola, Ebola” started. They were also placed in an empty hotel while playing in Cameroon as well as forced to undergo checks for the Ebola virus twice a day, even though the players had not been in Sierra Leone for about three months.
No country has stepped up enthusiastically to take Morocco’s place, though Angola, Nigeria, and Gabon are possibilities. The Confederation of African Football will have to either find a new host country, postpone the tournament, or cancel it altogether. African soccer players, officials, and fans await their decision, which is expected to come soon.