Afcon 2025: Why Egypt v South Africa remains one of African football’s great rivalries

After nearly 200 matches at the sharp end of international football, you get to recognise defining trends in the sport. Hossam Hassan, capped 176 times as a player with Egypt and about to take on his 21st match as their head coach, knows as well as anybody how far the rivalry with the Pharaohs’ next opponents in the Africa Cup of Nations, South Africa, has shaped the modern axis of power on the continent.

Hassan won the first of his three Afcons as a player almost four decades ago, in the spring of 1986, as a young up-and-coming striker with Al Ahly and a junior member of a talented squad. A magnificent career had been launched, one that would make Hassan the Pharaohs' most prolific all-time goalscorer.

But the Cup of Nations was smaller back then. For one thing, the vast nation on Africa’s southern tip was still excluded from it, banned by Fifa, football’s governing body, because of the then South African minority government’s racist apartheid policies. Afcons were more exclusive, too. In those days, they involved just eight teams, a third of the number of participants in Morocco for the current, 35th edition of the continent’s showpiece.

Hassan bore close witness to the gradual expansion while his own legend grew. By the time he was preparing for the 1998 Cup of Nations, as the 31-year captain of Egypt, South Africa had become a democracy, Nelson Mandela elected as its president, and the