Senegal’s World Cup journey ended in the round of 32 with a 3-2 extra-time defeat to Belgium, having squandered a two-goal lead with five minutes of normal time remaining. The loss, which followed a group stage that included defeats to France and Norway and a 5-0 rout of Iraq to scrape through as a best third-placed side, marked a sharp underperformance for a team that had entered the tournament as African champions.

Within days, the inquest began. Head coach Pape Thiaw was dismissed, and federation president Abdoulaye Fall convened a press conference that would shift the focus from on-field failings to a startling administrative lapse. Fall disclosed that the team’s chief medical officer, Dr Abderahmane Fédiore, was by training a gynaecologist and obstetrician, not a sports-medicine specialist. “I discovered this too late,” Fall said, adding that players had expressed unease and a lack of confidence in the medical care, forcing the federation to hurriedly bring in additional specialists during the tournament.

The claim, reported widely from Dakar to Tehran, was immediately contested. The Senegalese Association of Sports Medicine issued a statement calling the allegations “baseless and defamatory”, and pointed out that Fédiore holds a specialist diploma in sports medicine and sport biology from Cheikh Anta Diop University. He has served as the national team’s doctor since 2017, across three World Cups and five Africa Cup of Nations tournaments, and previously headed the physiotherapy department at Fann Hospital. The association’s rebuttal, carried by international wire services, underscored a deepening rift between the federation and the country’s medical establishment.

The doctor controversy is only the most vivid symptom of a wider organisational breakdown. Senegalese and Spanish media have detailed a litany of complaints: players and senior figures such as Sadio Mané and Kalidou Koulibaly deemed the team hotel inadequate, the absence of a dedicated chef forced squad members to rely on food-delivery apps, and Thiaw himself had threatened not to travel to the United States over a contract dispute, with the intervention of Senegal’s president required to resolve the stand-off. Fall acknowledged that the coach’s relationship with the federation had fractured, citing financial demands and contractual wrangling.

With Thiaw gone and the federation’s internal review under way, Senegal faces a period of introspection. The next competitive fixtures are not immediate, but the credibility of the federation’s leadership has been severely tested. The episode has left the African champions searching for a new coach and a renewed sense of professional rigour, even as the medical association demands a retraction and apology from Fall. For a team that lifted the continental trophy in January, the post-mortem from a World Cup that promised much has delivered only recrimination.