Issa Hayatou, who has died aged 77, was a sports administrator and football executive who was the combative and imposing president of the Confederation of African Football (CAF) between 1988 and 2017 and played a key role in the game’s global affairs; he pushed the interests of his continent’s football establishment, which profited from his business acumen, but his legacy was tarnished by his involvement in several scandals.
Hailing from an influential family, Issa Hayatou, the son of a sultan, was born on August 9 1946 in Garoua, in what was then French Cameroon; his older brother Sadou served briefly as the country’s prime minister in the 1990s. Young Issa had a successful sporting career, representing his country at basketball and athletics and holding national records in the 400metres and 800m.
He worked as a PE teacher at a secondary school in the capital, Yaoundé, but in 1974, when he was 28, his sports-politics career hit the ground running when he was named general secretary of the Cameroon Football Federation; in 1986 he became chairman, and the following year he was elected president of the CAF.
During his tenure he was credited with leading “African soccer swiftly and surely out of the ghetto”, as New African magazine put it; he secured an increase in African places at World Cup finals tournament from two to five and promoted South Africa’s successful bid to host the 2010 tournament; Cameroon and Senegal both did well at World Cups, while Cameroon and Nigeria both won Olympic gold; he also introduced a Women’s Cup of Nations. CAF funds swelled from $1.25 million when he became president to $130 million when he stepped down.
He spoke strongly against the talent-drain of players from Africa to Europe: “After the flight of brains, African is confronted with the muscle exodus”, he said, which left clubs and national leagues “impoverished”.
He liked to flag himself up as an anti-corruption figure, and in 2002, as a vice-president of Fifa, world football’s governing body, he led an unsuccessful campaign to unseat its president, Sepp Blatter, who was besieged with accusations of malpractice. But scandal never seemed far away from Hayatou himself.
The first controversy was his involvement with the company International Sport and Leisure (ISL), which secured lucrative World Cup broadcasting rights but went bust in 2001. The BBC’s Panorama programme revealed that in 1995 Hayatou had received nearly 100,000 French francs (worth about £30,000 today) from the company.
He insisted that it was a gift for CAF rather than himself and Fifa let it go, but the International Olympic Committee was less complaisant, and reprimanded Hayatou for the conflict of interest.
More serious, though denied and unproven, was a whistleblower’s allegation that in 2010 Hayatou, along with another CAF official, had taken $1.5 million (£1.18 million) in bribes from Qatar to support its successful bid to host the 2022 World Cup. He rebutted the accusations, and no action was taken; he told a journalist who questioned him about it: “You don’t know who I voted for. You cannot speculate on this. You aren’t even as old as my son.”
Hayatou faced calls for his removal as head of CAF when he barred Togo from the 2012 and 2014 African Cup of Nations because they had pulled out of the 2010 tournament in Angola after their team bus had been riddled with bullets by a local separatist group.
“We were accused of not protecting the team,” he complained. “How could we have done that? CAF has no army or police force. They were supposed to travel by air, but they travelled by road.”
In 2015, when several senior Fifa officials, including Sepp Blatter, were arrested following an FBI investigation into corruption in sports marketing, Hayatou served as acting president until the election of Gianni Infantino the following year.
One of his final acts as CAF president had been signing a deal worth $1billion (£780 million) with the French media rights company Lagardère in 2015, but in 2021 he was banned by Fifa for a year for closing the deal without the approval of CAF’s executive committee. The suspension was overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Issa Hayatou was married and had four children.
Issa Hayatou, born August 9 1946, died August 8 2024
