TUNIS — The calendar for Tunisia's 2026-2027 Ligue 1 season will not be drawn again, the National Professional Football League said on Friday, closing a day in which several outlets had reported the opposite.

The draw was held on Wednesday 29 July at the headquarters of the Tunisian Football Federation, in the presence of representatives of the sixteen clubs and a court bailiff. Two separate urns were used: one for the order numbers, one for the club names. Videos circulating on social media afterwards appeared to show a ball being placed in the wrong urn.

By Friday morning, La Presse, Business News and Directinfo were all reporting, on the basis of league sources, that the LNFP intended to hold a fresh draw following the discovery of a handling error — while noting the league's own assessment that the anomaly had no effect on the results or on the composition of the calendar.

That afternoon the league's official spokesman, Hafedh Ben Ahmed, told the news agency TAP that "the question of a new draw absolutely does not arise" and that the matter was closed. He said the operation had been conducted in full transparency, with the clubs and the bailiff present, and that nothing justified repeating it since the regulatory procedures had been followed.

Two claims that do not sit together

Both positions cannot be right at the same time, and the gap between them is the actual story.

If the error was genuinely without consequence — a ball momentarily in the wrong container, corrected before it affected any pairing — then there was never a reason to consider a re-draw, and the morning's reports came from somewhere inside the league. If the error was serious enough that a re-draw was under consideration on Friday morning, then declaring the file closed by Friday afternoon, without publishing what was reviewed and on what basis, does not answer the question.

Many observers took the view that the mishandling changed nothing about the fixture list. That may well be correct. It is also not verifiable from outside, because the league has not released the video record of the operation or the bailiff's report.

What would settle it

The bailiff was there precisely for this. A bailiff's report is a formal document; publishing it, together with the full unedited footage of the draw, would let anyone reconstruct the sequence of balls and confirm — or not — that the calendar drawn matches the balls drawn. Several European leagues publish complete draw footage as a matter of routine for the same reason.

Two structural fixes are also available and neither is expensive. The first is a published draw protocol: the number of urns, what goes in each, what happens when a ball is misplaced, and who has the authority to stop and restart the procedure. The second is a named independent observer with a mandate to halt the draw in real time rather than a bailiff whose role is to record what happened.

The season begins in a few weeks with a calendar that most clubs will accept. The cost of the past three days is not the fixture list; it is that a procedure designed to be beyond argument became an argument, and the league's own communication moved in two directions in a single day.