An elimination in the controversy. Saturday evening, a few moments after their defeat against Nigeria in the quarter-finals of CAN 2025 (0-2), the Algerian players strongly protested against the refereeing, considering themselves wronged by the decisions of Issa Sy, the Senegalese official in charge of the game.
Very virulent against the man with the whistle – to the point of heckling him and his assistants all the way to the entrance to their locker room – the Fennecs, largely dominated throughout the match, considered that they should have benefited from a penalty in the 12th minute of the match. In question: a cross from Farès Chaïbi deflected with the hand by Junior Ajayi in his own penalty area. Insufficient to push Mr. Sy, not alerted by his VAR referees, to designate the penalty point.
“I hate talking about refereeing after a defeat but… it’s true that there was a penalty for us in the first half,” denounced Riyad Mahrez, the captain of the Greens, in the mixed zone. “Everyone saw (the Nigerian hand)”, he assured, in the same vein as his teammate Rayan Aït-Nouri. “The referee must whistle in the first half on the center of Farès (Chaïbi) where there is clearly a hand in the area”.
The regulations have evolved
But are the Algerian protests really legitimate? On social networks, several followers tried to explain the referee’s decision by the fact that Chaïbi’s cross first bounced off Ajayi’s thigh before hitting the Nigerian defender’s hand. If, for a few seasons, certain hand faults were not reported when the ball had touched another part of the player’s body before his arm, this point is no longer mentioned in the regulations established by the International Football Association Board (IFAB) in the Laws of the Game, the text to which all referees of competitions governed by Fifa, of which the CAN is a part, refer.
For the 2025-2026 season, hand faults are reported if the offending player “deliberately touches the ball with the arm or hand, for example with a movement of the arm or hand towards the ball”, we can read in article 12.1 of the IFAB regulations.
In the action in question, Ajayi does not seem to intentionally touch the ball with his hand, but rather tries to counter it with his leg. On the other hand, the framework of the Super Eagles defense could, for some, seem much more faulty if we rely on the second paragraph of the article, based on the notion of increase in body surface area.
Junior Ajayi could have been sanctioned
“It is a foul if a player touches the ball with his arm or hand: by having artificially increased the surface covered by his body,” writes the IFAB. “A player is considered to have artificially increased the surface area covered by his body when the position of his arm or hand is not a consequence of the movement of his body in that specific situation or is not justifiable by such a movement. By having his arm or hand in such a position, the player takes the risk of touching the ball with these parts of the body and thus being penalized. »
By stopping at this precise point, Ajayi could undoubtedly have been sanctioned by the referee given the position of his hand, which was largely off the ground and therefore effectively increasing his body surface area. The fact remains that the referee decided otherwise.
