Zambia beat Egypt 6-0, lost 1-0 to Nigeria and beat Malawi 2-1: six points, eight scored, two conceded, a goal difference of +6. That was the best of all sixteen teams at this year’s Women’s Africa Cup of Nations in Morocco — better than Morocco’s +5, Côte d’Ivoire’s +4 and the +2 of both Malawi and Cameroon, the other two group winners. Zambia went home before the quarter-finals. Malawi, Nigeria and Zambia all finished Group C on six points, and in the mini-league of their three matches against each other all three had three points and a goal difference of zero, so it fell to the third rung of CAF’s ladder, goals scored in those matches: Malawi four, Nigeria three, Zambia two. Overall goal difference is the fifth item on the list. The mechanism was explained by P.M. News in Nigeria on 6 August.
What has not been reported is that CAF ran a tournament its own published rules do not describe. The only Women’s Africa Cup of Nations regulations on CAF’s official-documents page are the 2020 edition. Its Article 70.1 forms three groups of four, and Article 72.1 sends the top two of each group plus the two best third-placed teams to the quarter-finals. Morocco 2026 had four groups of four, and only the top two of each went through. Under the format CAF publishes, the best third-placed teams reach the knockout rounds; under the format CAF ran, they do not.
The same article carries a typesetting error CAF has not fixed. The tie-break ladder runs 71.2.1, 71.2.2, 71.2.3, 71.2.4 — and then 72.2.5, 72.2.6, 72.2.7, with the wrong prefix repeated inside 71.2.4’s own text. The men’s Africa Cup of Nations regulations carry an identical ladder, correctly numbered 74.2.1 through 74.2.7, so nothing turned on which document was applied. Zambia’s Barbra Banda left the tournament on five goals, still its leading scorer when the quarter-finals began.