Since the triumph of the national team at the World Cup in Qatar, the practice of football has been booming in the kingdom. For both boys and girls.
“Have you ever seen children struggling to become goalkeepers? Gabriel Hicham Guedira is still amazed. At Juventus Academy, a football school he set up in Casablanca in 2018, the young generation no longer merely want to score goals. “They want to look like Yassine Bounou [the goalkeeper of the Atlas Lions, who plays for the Saudi club Al-Hilal],” laughs the former fitness coach of Grenoble Foot 38, who sees it as an effect of the World Cup in Qatar.
Since the Moroccan selection reached the semi-finals of the competition for the first time in December 2022, this enthusiast of the round ball converted into business, observing a new attraction for positions, essentially defensive and hitherto unpopular. And more broadly, a footballing of the sport, with “young people who preferred to let go of basketball or volleyball to play with their feet”.
The enthusiasm aroused by Mountakhab, the national football team, is the most notable evolution since Morocco’s meteoric rise in the FIFA rankings. The selection, which reached eleventh place in the world after its performance in Qatar – it was not in the first fifty-four years before —, is now a dream. Exit Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, the two stars of European football, who have long monopolized the love of Moroccan fans. “Today, everybody wants a Bounou or a Ziyech [striker Hakim Ziyech plays in Galatasaray] in the family,” says sports policy researcher Moncef Lyazghi.
“Renard reconciled us with our team and Regragui made us love him”
For the myriad of training centers, academies, and private football schools in the big cities, the fervor around the players has been synonymous with an increase in attendance from the start of the 2023 school year. Over a year, “we had 60% more registrations in our Casablanca complex and 300 more in Bouskoura”, says Adil Halla, the vice-president of Raja, one of the two clubs in the Moroccan economic capital. The queue at the opening of registrations and the parents disappointed because there are no more places after a few days? “I had never seen that,” says Moncef Lyazghi, whose two boys have been enrolled for years at the FUS school in Rabat.
However, the ardour aroused by the results of Mountakhab has not always been, far from it. “We had a long journey through the desert,” says journalist Amine Rahmouni, a sports consultant for Moroccan public radio 2M. Between the final loss at the African Cup of Nations in 2004 and the appointment of Hervé Renard as coach in 2016, I have almost nothing but bad memories. Winner of two continental titles with Zambia and Côte d ‘Ivoire, the current coach of the French women’s football team has not won any trophies with Morocco. But it allowed the selection to reconnect with international competitions, after years of lean cows.
“Renard reconciled us with our team and Regragui [Walid Regragui, the coach of the Atlas Lions] made us love him.” Points out Amine Rahmouni, for whom the real football revolution is not to be found in the performances of the Lions or the number of practitioners, but more in the new profiles of supporters. “Meetings are no longer just between friends, but with family. The national team even managed the feat of mobilizing older women, who were much less interested in the round ball. »
The Golden Age
Since football in Morocco is no longer just a man’s affair. Like boys, there are more and more girls in the field. In Rabat, where the Juventus Academy is also present, “their number doubled in 2023,” says Gabriel Hicham Guedira. And this increase is not only due to the Lions and their exploits. By hoisting themselves in 2022 in the final of the African Cup of Nations, and by reaching the round of 16 for the first time at the last World Cup, the Lionesses have also contributed “to bringing Moroccan women closer to football,” says Moad Oukacha.
The president of the Sporting Club of Casablanca, who finished second in the Women’s Champions League of the African Cup of Nations in 2023, sees it as the success of the “Marshall Plan”, launched in 2020 by the Moroccan federation to develop women’s football. Since then, the budget of the National Women’s League has increased “sevenfold”, according to him, the first and second divisions have been professionalized and all clubs have started to invest heavily in the training of girls.
Is the democratization of football on the way? “No doubt, but the infrastructure does not follow,” says Moncef Lyazghi. All sports joint, there is unique sports unit per 30,000 inhabitants. For football, it’s one for every 74,000 inhabitants. In addition to the disparity between the regions, he noted the insufficient number of licensees. “Hardly 80,000, or less than 0.2% of the population,” insists the researcher, who sponsors for the implementation of a government strategy to create sports units and training academies “throughout Morocco, not only in Rabat or Casablanca”.
However, the development of grassroots football, which promotes mass participation and promotes integration, seems to be underway. “We are witnessing a spectacular development of associations and small clubs, with the multiplication of local courts and a practice that is structured through real supervision and the organization of tournaments,” notes Fadel Abdellaoui, a former member of the Raja management committee, who recalls how football has always been important “from a social point of view”.
Gone to last, the post-Qatar euphoria is no longer limited to the grass. Less publicized, but equally impressive, the success of the Moroccan selection in futsal has consecrated a discipline in which the kingdom is a prodigy: winner of the African Cup of Nations in 2020, quarter-finalist of the World Cup in 2021, champion of the Arab World in 2022 and 2023… Amine Rahmouni is categorical: “Morocco is living its golden age of global football. »
Alexandre Aublanc
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