TUNIS — The Tunisian Football Federation has given clubs until 17 August to complete the procedures required to obtain their licence for the 2026–2027 season, an extension announced on Saturday that leaves five days between the new deadline and the opening round of Ligue 1 on 22 and 23 August.

The federation said the additional time is intended to let the clubs concerned regularise their position, in particular by concluding agreements settling their financial disputes. It did not name them.

A day later, one of the clubs at the centre of the summer's licensing anxiety appeared to be clear. Étoile Sportive du Sahel will be able to obtain its licence after settling 18 financial disputes over the summer through its independent disputes commission, working with the club's supporters. Some files were paid in full; others were closed through agreements combining an advance payment with a schedule of instalments. The commission's work was funded in part by an unusually strong response to the club's season-ticket campaign and by sales of the new shirts.

What a licence actually tests

The licence at issue is not European-style financial fair play. It is the club licensing system established by the Confederation of African Football and applied nationally by member federations, covering sporting, administrative, legal, infrastructure and financial criteria. On the financial side, a club must show it has no overdue payables to former players, coaches, employees or other clubs in the categories the regulation covers.

Crucially, that does not require every dinar to be paid at once. A debt ceases to be overdue if it has been paid, deferred by a written agreement accepted by the creditor, or validly contested before a competent jurisdiction. A formal instalment schedule can therefore be enough — provided it is honoured. That is why the federation's extension is framed around "agreements" rather than payments, and why a club can move from crisis to compliance inside a few weeks.

The sanction, when the criteria are not met, is not confined to continental competition. A club that fails the mandatory criteria in the national regulation can be refused the licence it needs to enter Ligue 1 at all.

The same summer, every summer

Étoile's file illustrates the scale involved. According to Tunisie Numerique, the club needed to deal with some 5.8 million dinars to obtain its licence — of which 1.3 million had been settled by 12 July, according to provisional-committee spokesman Marouane Tefifha. That figure is a fraction of the club's overall position: its total debt stood at 105.5 million dinars at 30 June 2025, including roughly 24 million owed to players and staff and close to 53 million owed to former president Ridha Charfeddine. CS Hammam-Lif, newly promoted, was reported by Nessma Sport to need around 635,000 dinars to close its urgent files. Club Athlétique Bizertin remains financially fragile but, on the public record, is under watch rather than facing a specific deadline.

The pattern is structural. As of 13 July, Tunisian clubs still had 14 active disputes before FIFA. The mechanism repeats: a club signs a contract it cannot durably fund, the creditor obtains a final decision, and the money must then be found in an emergency — often by directors who did not sign the original contract, and increasingly by supporters, local authorities and regional public enterprises.

What would break the cycle

Tunisie Numerique, which examined the three cases in detail, argues that a popular rescue can save a season but cannot substitute for budget control, and closes on the question the licensing calendar poses each year: how long will Tunisian football wait until the last weeks of summer to discover whether clubs have the administrative right to play in a championship they have already qualified for on the pitch?

The regulation itself suggests where the leverage sits. Because deferral agreements satisfy the financial criterion, the binding constraint is not the licence deadline but the moment a contract is signed. Publishing licensing decisions and their reasoning would also help: the Jeunesse Sportive Kairouanaise complained in June that clubs were being treated unevenly, some required to pay in full while others negotiated schedules — a grievance that is difficult to adjudicate precisely because the decisions are not public.

Étoile's supporters have bought their club another season. The federation has bought three or four clubs another nine days.