The Confederation of African Football (CAF) has opened the tender process for the Sub-Saharan African media rights to the 2027 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON), seeking to build on the record audience figures generated by the 2025 tournament in Morocco.
The tender covers free-to-air and pay-TV rights across Sub-Saharan Africa, with coverage available in English, Swahili, Portuguese, isiZulu, Wolof, Yoruba and other local languages. French-language pay-TV rights are excluded from the package.
Interested broadcasters and media companies have until September 14 to submit their bids.
The 2027 AFCON will be jointly hosted by Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda from June 19 to July 17. The tournament will return to East Africa for the first time since Ethiopia hosted the competition in 1976 and will become the first AFCON edition to be staged across three countries.
CAF is entering the rights process with significant audience data from the 2025 tournament in Morocco. According to the confederation, the competition generated more than 3.2 billion cumulative television viewers and six billion digital views.
While the 3.2 billion figure represents cumulative viewing rather than 3.2 billion individual viewers, the scale of the reported audience provides CAF with a strong commercial benchmark as it seeks to increase the value of its flagship national-team property.
The media rights tender is part of a broader commercial push by CAF. The confederation last month launched a separate tender for the global commercial rights to the 2028, 2032 and 2036 AFCON editions.
CAF has also begun the commercial process surrounding the 2027 tournament, with tenders already issued for host broadcast production, television graphics and ticketing.
Beyond the senior AFCON, the confederation is putting rights to several other competitions on the market, including the 2027 AFCON qualifiers, the U20 and U17 Africa Cups of Nations, the U23 tournament, the 2026 Beach Soccer AFCON and the Futsal AFCON.
The latest tender highlights CAF’s efforts to convert the growing reach of African football into greater media revenues. With the 2025 AFCON delivering record television and digital consumption, the challenge for CAF will be to translate that audience growth into higher-value broadcast agreements while retaining sufficient free-to-air coverage to ensure broad accessibility across the continent.