Uefa and Caf have turned a personal injustice into a deliberate institutional counter move, but the opaque US rationale that grounded Artan in Miami is the question the appointment does not resolve.
Omar Artan held the diplomatic passport. He held the visa. He held the 2025 Confederation of African Football men's referee of the year award and a FIFA listing that dates to 2018. The United States border in Miami said none of it mattered. Suspected association with terror organisations, a travel ban still in force, a dream stopped at the runway. Eight months later, UEFA and CAF gave him the whistle for the Super Cup between Paris Saint-Germain and Aston Villa in Salzburg on August 12 (BBC Sport).
The appointment is real. The questions the US never answered are still open.
Read on the surface, the announcement looks like a feel-good footnote to a story that should have ended in May. Read at the level both federations want you to read it, it is something more pointed. UEFA did not pick Artan to compensate him. It picked him with CAF, on a stage that puts the two confederations' logos on the same broadcast, eight months after the US Customs and Border Protection officer in Miami wrote the words that grounded him. UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin, quoted in the same announcement, called the move a way of "connecting people" and a mark of "respect to Omar and his outstanding officiating skills" (BBC Sport). CAF president Patrice Motsepe, per UEFA, backed the choice enthusiastically. The framing is diplomatic. The decision is not.
The cost of the original denial still belongs to Artan. In a New York Times interview cited by BBC Sport, he laid it out plainly: "I had the right papers and everything. I had the right visa. I'm just simply a referee who's trying to live his dream, the biggest dream of my life." He did not accuse anyone of anything. He did not perform outrage. He described a referee who had cleared every bureaucratic gate his sport could put in front of him, and still did not board the plane.
The US rationale, on the official record, was that Artan was alleged to have "association with suspected members of terror organisations" — language that travels with Somalia's placement on the Trump-era travel ban list, and with the long shadow that Al Shabab casts over any Somali passport at an American counter. The wording is opaque. The official explanation has not been updated since. FIFA, before the Super Cup appointment, communicated the denial as final. The reversal in tone is the news (BBC Sport).
That is what makes Salzburg matter. PSG arrive as Champions League winners; Aston Villa as Europa League winners. The Super Cup is a single match between two clubs, not a tournament that will define either season. But the refereeing assignment is a credential that no visa officer in Miami can take back, and the camera on Artan in the Ernst Happel Stadion will be wider than any World Cup touchline would have offered him.
It is also, by the federations' own framing, a model. A Somali referee caught between an American travel ban and the global calendar of his own sport is exactly the kind of case that sports governance is supposed to handle quietly, with a private letter and a future assignment that nobody covers. UEFA and CAF chose the loud version instead. They chose to be seen doing it.
What they have not done is answer for Artan the question the US never answered. No agency has published the underlying intelligence cited at the Miami counter. No one has explained how a single-entry US visa and a diplomatic passport were considered and still found insufficient. The Super Cup whistle restores the platform. It does not restore the explanation.
Watch Salzburg on August 12. Watch the broadcast framing. And watch whether anyone in Washington is asked, before then, what "association with suspected members of terror organisations" actually means when the person standing at the counter holds a FIFA badge, a CAF award, and nothing else.