Nigeria has been confirmed as host of the 2026 CAF Awards ceremony in Lagos in December, setting up a compelling home-soil showdown between Victor Osimhen, Ademola Lookman, Achraf Hakimi and Brahim Diaz for African Player of the Year.
48th CAF Ordinary General Assembly: October 2026, Abuja
2026 CAF Awards Ceremony: December 2026, Lagos
Last Nigerian edition: 2017 (Abuja — Riyad Mahrez won Men’s POTY)
Previous Lagos edition: January 2015 (Eko Hotel — Yaya Touré, Asisat Oshoala)
Nigeria’s most important year in football administration just got considerably more significant. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu confirmed during the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, that his government has approved Nigeria’s bid to host both the 48th CAF Ordinary General Assembly and the 2026 CAF Awards ceremony. The General Assembly takes place in Abuja in October, while the gala night itself is scheduled for Lagos in December, ending a four-year run of the event being held exclusively in Morocco.
The announcement was made following a direct meeting between Tinubu and CAF President Dr Patrice Motsepe, with senior figures from the Nigerian football establishment in attendance, including NFF President Ibrahim Musa Gusau, former NFF president and Special Adviser to the CAF President Amaju Pinnick, Minister of Foreign Affairs Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu, and CAF Acting General Secretary Samson Adamu. The NFF’s formal statement confirmed the news through its Director of Communications, Ademola Olajire.
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What Nigeria Is Bidding For Athletically
Beyond the logistics and diplomacy of hosting, the real excitement for Nigerian supporters lies in what the ceremony could deliver on the night itself. Victor Osimhen arrives at the 2026 awards as one of the most credible candidates for African Men’s Player of the Year after a season in which he helped Galatasaray win a fourth successive Turkish Süper Lig title, scored 15 league goals and five assists in 22 appearances, and delivered a Champions League hat-trick against Ajax in November 2025.
He finished second to Achraf Hakimi at the 2025 edition in Rabat, with Hakimi claiming the prize after helping Paris Saint-Germain win the UEFA Champions League and Ligue 1 double. Ademola Lookman, who won the award in 2024 after his Europa League final hat-trick for Atalanta, is also expected to be among the contenders following another productive season that included a move to Atletico Madrid in February 2026 and nine goals in all competitions for the Spanish club despite arriving mid-season.
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The Moroccan Challenge That Cannot Be Ignored
The competition for the 2026 award will not be a straightforward Nigerian coronation. Hakimi and Brahim Diaz both enter the race with legitimate claims built on outstanding campaigns for club and country. Hakimi, the reigning winner, will be difficult to displace if PSG continue their European dominance into the 2025-26 Champions League final stages, while Diaz was named Player of the Tournament at the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations in Morocco, giving him one of the most prestigious individual honours available in the continental calendar.
Diaz’s tournament performances for Morocco in particular gave him a profile beyond club football that the Nigerian contenders will need to match at the 2026 World Cup in the United States this summer. The World Cup is not included in the CAF Awards evaluation period for the 2026 ceremony, which covers the 2025-26 club season and continental competitions up to a defined cutoff, but the reputational boost from a strong tournament showing can influence the mood around a player heading into voting season.
The Women’s Categories And What Nigeria Is Already Defending
On the women’s side, Nigeria arrives at its own ceremony as the defending Women’s National Team of the Year, an honour the Super Falcons collected at the 2025 ceremony in Rabat. Goalkeeper Chiamaka Nnadozie also successfully retained her Women’s Goalkeeper of the Year crown at that same event, giving Nigeria two individual and collective trophies from a night dominated in the men’s categories by Morocco.
The upcoming Women’s Africa Cup of Nations (WAFCON), scheduled to take place in the second half of 2026, will carry enormous weight in deciding the women’s categories for the Lagos ceremony. The Super Falcons are the reigning WAFCON champions, having defeated Morocco 3-2 in the 2024 final, and if they defend their title, the argument for sweeping the women’s awards on home soil will be compelling. Rasheedat Ajibade, who finished runner-up to Ghizlane Chebbak for Women’s Player of the Year at the 2025 edition in Rabat, will be looking to go one better at a ceremony held in her own country.
As reported by FootballInNigeria.com.ng, the last time Nigeria hosted the CAF Awards was in January 2017 in Abuja, where Algeria’s Riyad Mahrez won the men’s prize and Asisat Oshoala claimed the women’s award. That Abuja ceremony was the fourth time Nigeria had hosted the event, following editions in Lagos. The December 2026 gathering in Lagos will be the fifth, a record that underlines how central Nigeria remains to African football’s ceremonial landscape. Fans looking to follow every development from the World Cup through to the December ceremony can use the Bet9ja login page to access their account and manage their bets across the entire sporting calendar.
Why This Matters Beyond The Trophy Podium
Hosting the CAF Awards is not merely a question of national pride or a convenient backdrop for individual awards. The ceremony brings together African football’s most senior administrators, global media, and hundreds of delegation representatives from across the continent’s 54 member associations. Lagos staging the event in December 2026, coming off the back of Nigeria’s participation in the World Cup earlier that summer, will place the country at the centre of African football conversation at precisely the moment when discussions about the continent’s football governance, development funding, and competition structures for the next cycle are being shaped.
For Nigerian football supporters, the prospect of watching Osimhen or Lookman walk up to collect the continent’s most prestigious individual award in front of a Lagos crowd represents something that goes beyond a single evening. It would be the highest-profile intersection of Nigerian football, Nigerian soil, and continental recognition in almost a decade, and the build-up through a World Cup summer only adds to the anticipation.
📌 Did You Know?
- Nigeria has hosted the CAF Awards four times before the 2026 Lagos ceremony: in 2008, 2013, 2015, and 2017. The 2015 Lagos edition at the Eko Hotel Convention Centre is particularly memorable as the night Asisat Oshoala won her first Women’s Player of the Year award before going on to claim a record six titles in total.
- Achraf Hakimi won the 2025 CAF Men’s Player of the Year award in Rabat on November 19, 2025, finishing ahead of Mohamed Salah and Victor Osimhen after helping PSG win the UEFA Champions League and Ligue 1. He became the first Moroccan player to win the award since Mustapha Hadji in 1998.
- The 2017 CAF Awards in Abuja, the most recent Nigerian edition, saw Riyad Mahrez win the men’s prize for Algeria while Asisat Oshoala claimed the women’s honour. It was Oshoala’s second successive women’s award and one of the most celebrated nights in Nigerian football administration.
- Ademola Lookman won the 2024 CAF Men’s Player of the Year award in Marrakesh after his Europa League final hat-trick for Atalanta, becoming the second Nigerian player to win the award after John Obi Mikel in 2004 and Jay-Jay Okocha’s dominance of the earlier editions, and the first since Mikel to win it consecutively from a non-Ballon d’Or contender profile.
- Chiamaka Nnadozie, the Super Falcons goalkeeper, has now won the CAF Women’s Goalkeeper of the Year award for two consecutive years, in 2024 and 2025, making her one of the most consistently recognised Nigerian women’s players in the ceremony’s history.
- The Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, where Tinubu and Motsepe finalised Nigeria’s hosting agreement, also brought together multiple African heads of state and CAF officials to discuss the continent’s development agenda, with football governance forming a significant part of the discussions.
- Brahim Diaz, one of the expected POTY contenders for the 2026 Lagos ceremony, was born in Malaga, Spain, and played for Manchester City and AC Milan before representing Morocco internationally, switching allegiance after initially playing for Spain at youth level.
