In Doha in December 2022, after Morocco beat Portugal to become the first Arab and African nation to reach a World Cup semi-final, a supporter made his way to a BBC camera outside the stadium and said four words that captured something statistics and tactics could not. “Finally,” he said, “football smiles back at Arabs.”
He was one man. What he described was continental. Cafés around Riyadh filled to capacity with fans watching games and rooting for a team from a country not their own. In Gaza City and Ramallah, stadiums broadcast the Atlas Lions’ matches on oversized screens. Cars in Beirut were draped in Moroccan red and green. In Algiers, horns honked in jubilation. Revellers in Baghdad and Muscat carried on similarly. Nigeria’s President said Morocco had “made the entire continent proud.” In Muslim-majority countries as far away as Indonesia, fans gathered for collective prayer sessions while the matches played. Al Jazeera declared that the team gave people from the Global South “the power to believe.”
Morocco was just the third team from outside Europe or South America to reach a World Cup final four. But the meaning of what happened far exceeded the statistical milestone. What Morocco produced in Qatar — a run that dismantled Belgium, Spain and Portugal in succession, that raised the Palestinian and Amazigh flags simultaneously on one of the sport’s most visible stages, that celebrated goals with prostration while millions watched from across the Islamic world — was not easily contained within the vocabulary of football journalism. It required, as Abderrahim Bourkia, a sociology professor at Morocco’s Hassan I University, observed at the time, acknowledgement that the team was operating in a space where identity, politics and belonging were inseparable from the sport itself. Morocco, he suggested, defied easy categorisation: Arab and Amazigh and African at once, complicated and layered in ways that a single label could not hold.
The Atlas Lions seemed to understand this better than most of the commentary surrounding them. Regragui told reporters his team wanted to “fly Africa’s flag high just like Senegal, Ghana, Cameroon.” His players raised the Palestinian flag after victories. They raised the Amazigh flag, a symbol of the Indigenous Moroccan population from which upward of half the country’s people claim heritage. Both flags, simultaneously. Not one identity or another, but the full complexity of a team that had come to represent something far wider than its own nation.
Today in Houston, they face Canada in the Round of 16 of the 2026 World Cup. The question this tournament has been asking — whether 2022 was a moment or the beginning of something permanent — is about to receive another answer.
The Arms Race Morocco Won
For decades, two countries were engaged in what one observer described as a quiet battle to secure the best footballing talents born to Moroccan families. The Netherlands, with a Moroccan diaspora of approximately 450,000 people, seemed to hold the natural advantage. Dutch football academies — Ajax, PSV, Feyenoord — were training children of Moroccan heritage from early adolescence. The assumption, shared widely in Dutch football, was that the finest of those players would represent the Netherlands. For a generation, the assumption held.
Then Hakim Ziyech chose Morocco.
Marco van Basten — one of the greatest figures in Dutch football history, a man who scored what many regard as the finest goal in European Championship history — responded with undisguised contempt. “How can you be stupid enough,” he said, “to opt for Morocco when you are eligible for the Dutch team?” Ziyech’s answer was not addressed to Van Basten but has been quoted everywhere since: “I’ve always felt Moroccan. You choose with your heart.”
That sentence established something that no academy system and no federation policy could manufacture: a precedent. It told the next generation of Dutch-Moroccan players — boys raised on the streets of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, trained in the same systems that produced Ziyech, facing the same fork in the road — that heart was a legitimate criterion for the most consequential decision of their professional lives. That choosing Morocco was not a retreat from ambition but a different kind of ambition entirely.
The arithmetic of what followed tells the story precisely. At the 2022 World Cup, 14 of Morocco’s 26-man squad were born outside the country, including four in the Netherlands: Ziyech, Noussair Mazraoui, Sofyan Amrabat and Zakaria Aboukhlal. Morocco became the first African team to reach the World Cup semi-final. This year, 19 of their 26 players were born abroad. Three in the Netherlands — Mazraoui and Amrabat, now veterans of this particular decision, plus debutant Anass Salah-Eddine. Nine of the 2022 squad have returned; seventeen places have been taken by players new to this stage.
The Moroccan football federation understood, long before their European counterparts, that the diaspora was not simply a sentimental connection to the homeland. It was a talent pipeline — one that European academies were refining and polishing at great expense, and which Morocco could recruit into at the precise moment those players were ready to decide who they played for. Their scouting operations expanded accordingly. The federation even made contact with the entourage of Lamine Yamal — Spain’s most celebrated young talent, whose father was born in Morocco — to explore the possibility of a declaration.
The case of Ismael Saibari is the clearest illustration of how the system functions at its most sophisticated. Born in Spain, educated in football academies in Belgium and the Netherlands, he joined PSV — whose youth programme is among the finest in western Europe — in 2020. By the time he began representing Morocco in 2024, his technical profile bore the unmistakeable imprint of Dutch football development. He did not represent the Netherlands. He represented Morocco. In the Round of 32 at this World Cup, he stepped up for the decisive penalty in the shootout against the Netherlands — against the country whose system had trained him, for the country of his parents — and rolled it into the bottom corner. After the tournament, he will join Bayern Munich, who signed him for over 50 million euros during the competition itself.
Ayyoub Bouaddi’s journey followed a French trajectory rather than a Dutch one. Born in France to Moroccan parents, he played for French youth teams at every level, captaining the Under-21 side as recently as two months before the World Cup. The French football federation had every reason to believe he would remain theirs. Morocco’s federation worked to ensure otherwise. Head coach Mohamed Ouahbi — himself born in Belgium to Moroccan parents, a product of the very diaspora dynamic he now manages — described the recruitment process with unadorned directness after Morocco’s 2026 group-stage match against Brazil: “We had a lot of meetings with him to get him to choose Morocco, and he was good.” Bouaddi is valued at close to 100 million euros by European clubs including Arsenal, who have tracked him throughout this tournament. He is 18 years old and has started every match for Morocco.
Issa Diop, the centre-back born in France, was persuaded by the same approach. He scored the stoppage-time equaliser in the Round of 32 against the Netherlands — the goal that forced extra time, the goal that eventually led to the penalty shootout in which Saibari scored the winner and Yassine Bounou saved Crysencio Summerville’s effort.
Bounou was born in Montreal, Canada. Today he faces Canada.
The Dutch football establishment, watching all of this unfold in Monterrey, processed it slowly. Before the match, Rafael van der Vaart had said on Studio Voetbal that all the Moroccans who were not good enough for the Dutch team ended up playing for Morocco, and had predicted a 3-0 Netherlands win. Afterwards, on NOS, he acknowledged the truth plainly: “Morocco were the better team from the first minute.” He identified their midfield — Bouaddi, El Aynaoui, Ounahi — as the decisive factor. The midfield he called Morocco’s greatest strength is composed of the very players his pre-match framework had dismissed.
The silent addition to this story is Shaqueel van Persie — son of Robin van Persie, one of the Netherlands’ greatest strikers. Reports have emerged in recent weeks that the younger van Persie, eligible through his mother’s Moroccan heritage, may declare for Morocco. The arms race is not over. Morocco are winning it.
The Strait and Its Centuries
Spain’s relationship with Morocco adds a historical depth to this story that the Dutch dimension cannot match. The Strait of Gibraltar — fourteen kilometres of water between Tarifa and Tangier, the narrowest gap between Europe and Africa — has been crossed in both directions across thirteen centuries. Muslim armies crossed it northward in 711 to establish al-Andalus, the Islamic civilisation that flourished on the Iberian Peninsula for nearly eight centuries. When the Reconquista ended in 1492 and the last Muslim kingdom fell in Granada, an estimated 300,000 Moors crossed it southward, carrying with them a culture — the Andalusian musical tradition of al-ala and al-malhun, the architectural grammar of arches and tilework and courtyard gardens — that can still be heard and seen in the medinas of Fez, Tetouan and Chefchaouen. The cities of northern Morocco carry al-Andalus in their foundations. Spain, largely, does not.
Five centuries later, the crossing reversed again. Moroccan migrants arrived in Madrid and Seville and Málaga in the latter half of the twentieth century, working in the industries and service sectors of cities that their ancestors once governed. Achraf Hakimi was born in Madrid in 1998, the son of a father who worked as a street vendor and a mother who worked as a cleaner. He grew up in Vallecas, a working-class neighbourhood in the south of the capital. He came through Real Madrid’s academy — La Fábrica, the factory — from the age of eight, alongside players who would represent Spain. He chose Morocco. At the 2022 World Cup, in the quarter-finals, he stepped up for the decisive penalty in the shootout against Spain, sent the goalkeeper the wrong way, and turned away to celebrate with a composed expression that withheld everything the moment contained.
Brahim Díaz was born in Málaga, made a senior appearance for Spain before switching allegiance, and became the Atlas Lions’ most devastating attacking force at the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations — the first player in AFCON history to score in each of the first five matches of an edition. His journey from Málaga through Manchester City, AC Milan and Real Madrid to a Moroccan shirt at a World Cup traces a geography that the Strait of Gibraltar has shaped for over a thousand years. The Reconquista expelled the ancestors. The economic migration returned the children. The football federation brought the grandchildren back to the shirt.
That same geography will frame the 2030 World Cup, which Spain, Portugal and Morocco will co-host together — three countries sharing one of the most historically freighted maritime boundaries on earth, standing jointly on a podium at football’s defining event. The tournament Morocco’s players are currently competing in is, in one reading, a rehearsal for the one in which they will be the host. In another, it is the continuation of a crossing that has never really stopped.
What Football Means in Morocco
Morocco’s devotion to football is, like so much else in North African culture, layered with the history of the colonial period. The sport took root in the first half of the twentieth century under French and Spanish administration, and after independence in 1956 it was absorbed into the national fabric in ways that cannot be separated from questions of identity, belonging and social expression.
Inside Moroccan stadiums, things are said that would be difficult to say elsewhere. The ultra culture around domestic clubs — Raja Casablanca, Wydad, the Rabat sides — is brazenly political, using the relative latitude of the terrace to articulate grievances that the broader political environment does not readily accommodate. The songs are about migration, about injustice, about a country whose young people leave because it cannot hold them. The same social conditions that produced those songs produced the diaspora communities in Amsterdam and Marseille and Brussels and Lyon from which Morocco’s current generation of players emerged.
This is not a coincidence. It is a structure. The player who chose Morocco over France and the Netherlands did not choose it in spite of those conditions. They chose it, in part, because of them — because a national team shirt, worn for the country of your parents at a World Cup, is one of the few available ways to insist publicly on a belonging that the country of your birth has not always fully acknowledged.
“Football in Morocco is not only entertainment,” Bourkia has said. “It is a space of identity, belonging and social expression.” The national team has become the most visible manifestation of that space — the place where the complexity of Moroccan identity, all its Amazigh and Arab and African and diasporic dimensions, can be performed without requiring resolution. On the pitch, the players prostrate after goals. They pray together before matches. The collective rituals of Islamic practice are not incidental to who this team is. They are constitutive of it — a shared language of meaning that connects players who speak six different tongues and whose primary common tongue is English, who grew up in Vallecas and Málaga and Amsterdam and Lyon and Montreal, and who have found in the shared act of representing Morocco a community of belonging that club football has not always provided.
The System That Made Consistency Possible
None of what Morocco have built is accidental. In 2008, King Mohammed VI convened the Skhirat Sports Conference, establishing a long-term national development project built on three pillars: good governance, financial investment and competent human resources. The governance reforms came first — a national department for financial control cleaned up and professionalised the structure of Moroccan football from the bottom up. The investment was distributed deliberately: thousands of proximity fields built across the country, open and accessible to all, ensuring that the talent base was genuinely national rather than confined to the major cities.
The Mohammed VI Football Academy, built in Salé near Rabat, admits upward of a hundred promising boys each year, scouted as young as six, to live and train full time in a system that matches the finest youth development programmes in Europe and South America. Players including Nayef Aguerd, Azzedine Ounahi and Youssef En-Nesyri came through its structures. The results of this investment span every format in which Morocco compete. In the years surrounding this World Cup, they have been AFCON champions, Women’s AFCON finalists, Arab Cup champions, African Nations Championship winners, U-20 FIFA World Cup champions, U-17 AFCON champions, 2024 Olympic men’s bronze medallists and 2024 Futsal AFCON champions.
The U-20 World Cup triumph in Chile is particularly instructive. The coach who led the Atlas Cubs to a 2-0 victory over Argentina in the final — whose two proteges, Othmane Maamma and Yassir Zabiri, were awarded the tournament’s Golden Ball and Silver Ball respectively — was Mohamed Ouahbi. Three months later, following Walid Regragui’s departure from the senior role, Ouahbi was placed in charge of the team now in the Round of 16.
The coaching change was a consequence of the turbulence surrounding the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations. Morocco hosted the tournament. In a final played in Rabat in January 2026, Morocco were awarded a penalty in the eighth minute of stoppage time. Senegal’s players left the pitch in protest, remaining in their dressing room for approximately 17 minutes. The game eventually resumed. Brahim Díaz missed the penalty. Senegal won 1-0 in extra time. Two months later, the CAF Appeals Board ruled Senegal had forfeited the final by leaving the pitch without authorisation and awarded the title to Morocco 3-0. Senegal are appealing to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Regragui had already resigned before the ruling. The instability of the AFCON period, the pressure of the final result and the broader sense that the team needed renewal before the World Cup led to his departure.
Ouahbi inherited a squad in which only nine players from the 2022 core remained. He rebuilt around the diaspora generation he knew best — the generation he had coached at U-20 level, the generation raised in European academies, the generation that had chosen Morocco as Ziyech had chosen it before them. Morocco qualified with a perfect record: eight wins from eight matches, the first African nation to secure their place, 22 goals scored, two conceded, six clean sheets. They entered ranked sixth in the world. Tactically, Ouahbi’s influence is visible in the data: Morocco held 49 per cent of the ball against Brazil and produced a better expected goals figure than Regragui’s team managed against Spain or Portugal in 2022. The evolution is real. Said Abadi, a Moroccan journalist and football historian, noted the parallel between Regragui’s 2022 appointment — just months before the World Cup — and Ouahbi’s 2026 appointment under almost identical conditions. Both coaches took a team in transition to the Round of 16. The system is resilient enough to survive coaching transitions. That is the clearest sign of genuine institutional strength.
The History of Going Home Early
Morocco’s first World Cup was Mexico 1970, when they arrived as the African continent’s sole representative. They lost to West Germany, lost to Peru, drew with Bulgaria. There was a saying among Moroccan fans of that era, addressed to pilots before the flight home: Don’t turn off the engine, because we will go back as soon as we can.
In Mexico 1986, Morocco advanced from the group stage — the first African side to reach the knockout rounds after finishing top of their group. Lothar Matthäus’s 88th-minute free kick ended them. In France 1998, Salaheddine Bassir’s brace dismantled Scotland 3-0, but Norway advanced instead. Seven World Cup appearances. An overall record of played 23, won 5, lost 7, drawn 11. Before 2022, one knockout stage advance in their entire history.
The old saying about the pilot has been retired not through amnesia but through evidence. The proximity fields and the Mohammed VI Academy and the eligibility rule reforms and the recruiting trips to Amsterdam and Lyon and Brussels did not produce a single moment of glory. They produced a pattern: three consecutive World Cups, a semi-final, a Round of 32 victory over the Netherlands, a second consecutive Round of 16. The pattern is the argument.
What the Fans Cannot Attend
The communities for whom this team means the most are largely not in Houston today. Moroccan ticket demand in the resale market rose by 90 per cent before the tournament began, driven partly by fans who could not obtain US entry visas through conventional routes and were paying secondary-market prices regardless. Travel restrictions placed by the current US administration on several countries with large Muslim populations have kept many Arab and Moroccan supporters watching from living rooms in Casablanca, from phones in Amsterdam, from cafés in the French cities where Bouaddi and El Aynaoui grew up.
The team they are watching plays, in this sense, for a double audience — the one in the stadium and the one that cannot be there. Morocco’s players carry both. The prostrations after goals are not individual acts of piety but collective gestures legible to the communities watching from a distance, affirming that the players who left to learn their craft in European academies have not left everything behind. The captain in whom all of this converges — Hakimi, born in Madrid to parents who crossed the Strait, raised in Real Madrid’s system, now one of the finest defenders in the world at Paris Saint-Germain — wears the shirt of the country his parents came from. He holds the record for most World Cup appearances by a Moroccan player, jointly with Hakim Ziyech, at ten. He has not scored in any of them.
He is still the reason the stadium holds its breath.
Today Bounou, born in Montreal, faces Canada. Bouaddi, who told the French football establishment no, plays in the midfield Ouahbi described as the team’s greatest asset. Saibari, Bayern Munich’s newest player, lines up where Regragui’s forwards once stood. Behind all of them is a federation that understood in 2008 what European football is only now beginning to comprehend: that the children of the diaspora were not lost to their parents’ country. They were being prepared for it, in academies in Eindhoven and Lyon and Brussels, across fourteen kilometres of water that have been shaping this story for a thousand years.
The saying about the pilot is retired. The airplane does not go home early anymore.
Read more – The five African nations to win a World Cup knockout tie
Also see – From the Bench to the Spotlight: Gessime Yassine’s Key Role in Morocco’s Triumph
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