1. Issa Hayatou was a Cameroonian sports executive, athlete, and football administrator best known for serving as the president of the Confederation of African Football between 1988 and 2017.
20 Facts About Issa Hayatou
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Issa Hayatou served as the acting FIFA president until 26 February 2016 as the previous president Sepp Blatter was banned from all football-related activities in 2015 as a part of the that year's FIFA corruption investigation.
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Issa Hayatou was a member of the International Olympic Committee.
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Issa Hayatou was born in Garoua, in what was then French Cameroon, on 9 August 1946, the son of a local Sultan, and became a middle-distance runner and physical education teacher.
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Issa Hayatou had a successful career as an athlete, becoming a member of the Cameroonian national squads in both Basketball and Athletics, and holding national record times in the 400- and 800-metre running.
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Issa Hayatou lost his seventh re-election campaign to Ahmad Ahmad in March 2017.
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President of CAF for almost three decades, Issa Hayatou oversaw particularly successful FIFA World Cup appearances by Senegal, Nigeria, and Cameroon, and pushed for African places in the finals to increase from two to five, with the 2010 World Cup in South Africa seeing the hosts garner an automatic sixth spot for an African team.
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Issa Hayatou presided over both the bid and the organising committee for the 2010 games, the first in Africa.
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Just days before the end of the 2010 African Cup in Angola, Issa Hayatou found himself in the middle of a controversy after the CAF's suspension of the Togo national football team from the next two African Cup of Nations tournaments.
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Issa Hayatou charged the Togolese government with interference in the Togolese Football Association's affairs when the team withdrew from the 2010 cup prior to its start.
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In November 2010 Andrew Jennings, the presenter of FIFA's Dirty Secrets, an edition of BBC's flagship current affairs programme Panorama alleged that Issa Hayatou had taken bribes in the 1990s regarding the awarding of contracts for the sale of television rights to the football World Cup.
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Panorama claimed to have obtained a document from a company called ISL which showed that Issa Hayatou was paid 100,000 French Francs by the company.
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Issa Hayatou denied the allegations, saying that the money went not to him but to CAF.
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Issa Hayatou had previously headed FIFA's Olympic committee from 1992 to 2006.
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At the time of his appointment, Issa Hayatou was still under investigation for alleged bribery.
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Issa Hayatou died at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine, on 8 August 2024, a day before his 78th birthday.
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The Issa Hayatou family are traditional holders of the sultanate of Garoua.
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Issa Hayatou was son of the reigning sultan, and many relatives have acceded to powerful positions in Cameroonian society.
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The Issa Hayatou family continue to wield much political influence in northern Cameroon.
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On 3 November 2007, Issa Hayatou was awarded an honorary degree from Ladoke Akintola University of Technology in Ogbomosho, Oyo State, Nigeria.