Cameroon Won WAFCON. Nigeria Lost Its Coach and World Cup Streak.

Three teams walked into this tournament from three completely different places. Cameroon hadn't actually qualified for it on the pitch.

Malawi were making their WAFCON debut. And Nigeria arrived as defending champions and ten-time winners of the competition.

By the end, Cameroon had the trophy, Malawi had a World Cup place, and Nigeria had lost both.

Cameroon beat Malawi 3-0 in the final in Rabat on 16 August, with all three goals coming before half-time.

Marie Ngah Manga headed in the opener in the 20th minute, Naomi Eto doubled it ten minutes later with a first-time volley, and Ngah Manga added her second in first-half stoppage time.

It was Cameroon's fourth WAFCON final. The first three, in 2004, 2014 and 2016, all ended in defeat. They became only the fourth nation to win the tournament, after Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea and South Africa.

Getting there involved a genuine second chance. Cameroon had actually been eliminated in the final round of qualifying, losing 3-1 on aggregate to Algeria.

CAF then expanded WAFCON from 12 teams to 16, and filled the extra places with the four highest-ranked teams eliminated in that final qualifying round. Cameroon, 66th in the world at the time, were one of them.

From there, they knocked out Nigeria in the quarter-final, then beat host nation Morocco on penalties in the semi, after a goalless 120 minutes. A team that had lost its way into the tournament left as African champions.

If Cameroon provided the tournament's biggest result, Malawi provided its biggest surprise. They were ranked 153rd in the world, the lowest-ranked team in the entire tournament.

Few expected them to go far. Then they beat Nigeria 3-2 in their very first match, before knocking out Ghana and then Algeria to reach an unexpected final.

Sisters Temwa and Tabitha Chawinga led the run, combining for nine of Malawi's goals before the final.

The run also secured something far more significant than a historic final appearance. Malawi have now qualified for their first Women's World Cup, alongside Cameroon, Morocco and Algeria, the four teams that reached the semi-finals.

Nigeria's tournament fell apart in the opposite direction, and it happened in stages rather than all at once.

That opening defeat to Malawi was the first sign of trouble. Nigeria recovered by beating Zambia 1-0 and hammering Egypt 6-2 to reach the quarter-finals, where Cameroon beat them 1-0, a result that meant missing WAFCON's semi-finals for the first time in their history.

One route back remained, a play-off against South Africa, and Nigeria lost that too, 2-1.

For the first time since their Women's World Cup debut in 1991, Nigeria will not be at the tournament. The financial and competitive consequences of that failure are significant, and something we've examined in detail already.

Why did Nigeria's coach lose his job?

Four days after that final defeat, the Nigeria Football Federation made its move.

The federation's Executive Committee ordered head coach Justin Madugu and his entire technical staff to step down with immediate effect.

The statement, posted to the NFF's official account, gave no further detail. The federation has not publicly said the WAFCON results alone were the reason.

The timing is still what makes it sting. Barely a year earlier, Madugu had led Nigeria to a record-extending tenth WAFCON title, beating Morocco in a dramatic comeback final in the same city. CAF named him Coach of the Tournament for it.

He'd taken charge on an interim basis in September 2024, after American coach Randy Waldrum resigned, and the title win appeared to put his position on much firmer ground.

Instead, one tournament turned that into the opposite question: how quickly a coach's standing can change in international football.

The NFF isn't stopping at the coaching change either. A fact-finding committee has been set up to examine what went wrong, not just with the Super Falcons but across Nigeria's national teams more broadly.

The decision also comes with the NFF preparing for its own elections in September.

What WAFCON 2026 actually changed

Nigeria had won WAFCON ten times. Cameroon had reached three finals and lost all three. Malawi had never played in the tournament before. And yet the final was Cameroon against Malawi, not Nigeria against anyone.

Part of that is the tournament itself. Expanding from 12 teams to 16 didn't just add four extra names to the bracket.

It gave Cameroon, a team that had actually lost its way out of the competition, a genuine second route to the trophy. It also gave debut nations like Malawi and Cape Verde a stage they'd never had before.

The World Cup places tell the same story from a different angle. Malawi went from a WAFCON debut to a first ever World Cup qualification in the same three weeks that Nigeria lost the streak they'd held since 1991.

That's not a small shift. It's two nations swapping places in the space of one tournament.

Nigeria remain Africa's most successful women's national team by a wide margin, and nothing about this summer changes that history.

But WAFCON 2026 made one thing clear: that history doesn't qualify a team for anything on its own. It has to be backed up on the pitch, every time, and this time it wasn't.