Ziyech’s Forced Retirement: A Disgrace to Morocco’s Football Federation

Washinton DC – Hakim Ziyech’s decision to retire from international duties is the culmination of the Royal Moroccan Football Federation’s (FRMF) failure to learn valuable lessons from, and take appropriate decisions following, Morocco’s inglorious exit from the 2021 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON).

As many of us had feared long before yet another AFCON debacle for Morocco, leaving the Moroccan football team at the mercy of a whimsical, self-entitled, and bad-tempered manager like Vahid Halilhodzic was a serious leadership failure on the part of FRMF president Fouzi Lekjaa.

Known for his diligent and passionate work to put Moroccan football back on the continental podium — the Confederation of African Football (CAF) recently ranked Morocco’s league as the best in Africa — Lekjaa has gotten many of the big calls right in his tenure at the helm of the Moroccan league.

With such a record, many fans of Morocco’s Atlas Lions expected Fouzi to, at the very least, reason with Halilhodzic to end his pre-AFCON showdown with players like Hakim Ziyech and Noussair Mazraoui to boost Morocco’s chances of success in the just concluded AFCON. But FRMF’s decision not to intervene at this point was understandable to a certain extent.

Halilhodzic’s main argument had been that his team needed tactical discipline and a formidable esprit de corps to achieve Morocco’s AFCON ambitions. The suggestion, then, was that talented but allegedly feckless players like Ziyech and Mazraoui were not fit for the tactically compact and organizationally smart team Halilhodzic had built, or needed to build, to perform well at the AFCON.

But that bet proved disastrously wrong, with all of Morocco’s AFCON games making it abundantly clear that the creative genius and technical nous of a player of Ziyech’s caliber was badly needed in the Atlas Lions midfield. When FRMF appointed Halilhodzic two years ago, the contract between the two parties explicitly stated three goals: reaching the semifinals at the 2021 AFCON, qualifying for the 2022 World Cup, and winning the 2023 AFCON.

It is safe to say that Halihodzic has breached his contract by failing to reach the AFCON semifinals this time around, and so it was up to the FRMF to assess his time as Morocco’s coach and make a decision in the interest of the Moroccan team ahead of the two-legged World Cup playoffs against DR Congo.

Following Morocco’s spectacularly humiliating exit from the AFCON, the Atlas Lions’ sharp-tongued coach went too far in insulting Moroccans, the national flag, defaming and slandering Ziyech’s reputation. Making it all worse was that, as he did so, no FRMF officials intervened to stop him and put an end to his nonsense at his first post-AFCON press conference.

Defeat brings out humility in great men or coaches. More often than not, this means apologizing for one’s mistakes or misjudgments; it means making sure to let diehard fans and supporters know that you understand their anguish and that you’re sorry for letting them down.

That is, great coaches take responsibility, apologize, empathize with fans’ suffering, and — perhaps more importantly — vow to use today’s soul-crushing disappointment as a lesson in order to come or bounce back stronger and better tomorrow. But Halilhodzic did no such thing in his first post-AFCON conference.

Instead, he waxed shamefully sentimental about the death threats he purportedly received from some Moroccan fans after the national team’s defeat against Egypt in the quarter-finals. For somebody who has been in the footballing business all his life, first as a player and now as coach for four decades, Halilhdozic should know better than anyone that the messages he reportedly received from disgruntled fans is part and parcel of the experience of football.

So why insist on that trivial detail in his most important press conference as Morocco’s coach, rather than actually provide answers to the most essential questions about what went terribly wrong in Morocco’s 2-1 defeat to Egypt? Halilhodzic was not done, however. In the same press conference, he went on to denigrate Ziyech, stressing that the Chelsea star is an ill-disciplined player who will never play for Morocco so long as he is the coach.

If the press conference was an embarrassing and pitiful scene for Moroccans who saw the FRMF officials standing idly by and doing nothing to stop this madness, as one Moroccan commentator put it, it must have been at once devastating and eye-opening for Ziyech.

To be sure, the timing of Ziyech’s decision suggests that he was hoping to return to the national team, despite his expulsion from Morocco’s AFCON squad. However, as he observed how Halilhodzic came out safely from the AFCON and was not sacked despite his disastrous management, as he watched the Bosnian coach put on another Ziyech-bashing show when the topic was Morocco’s exit from a tournament the Chelsea man had not even played in, it is safe to say that he felt betrayal and heartbreak. And so he came to the conclusion that he has no place in this team.

Moroccans were enraged in the aftermath of the match between Morocco and Egypt because of the national team’s performance and Halilhodzic’s significant tactical errors, not particularly because of the team’s elimination — defeat is an integral part of football, of life.

“Senegal has Mane, Egypt has Salah,” Halilhodic has been quoted as saying when explaining what Morocco’s team is supposedly lacking to be a serious contender for the title of African champions.

But is it not the same Halilhodzic who, while justifying his incomprehensible decision not to call up Ziyech to his AFCON squad, argued that the best teams — at least his best teams — are built around group solidarity and collective discipline and not exceptionally talented individual players who think they can single-handedly make the difference?

Following Morocco’s bitter elimination from AFCON, many observers expected the FRMF to dismiss Vahid Halilhodzic, or at the very least put pressure on him to own up to his mistakes and remedy the tactical shortcomings that failed Morocco’s team against Egypt.

When a country’s officials respect the public’s viewpoint and care about the national team, the coach is either dismissed when his tactics fail, or pressured into making the concessions and changes needed to improve the team’s performances. With Halilhodzic and the FRMF, however, none of this seems to be on the agenda.

Man-management is an essential part of modern football coaching. All word-class managers know that getting the best out of exceptional, talented players takes the kind of diplomacy and people skills that Halilhodic has never displayed in his decades of coaching.

Just consider Ziyech’s trajectory at Chelsea under German coach Thomas Tuchel. A few months ago, everything seemed to suggest that Ziyech was unfit for Chelsea, that he was not disciplined enough to play in a Tuchel-coached team. But months of intense communication and man-management later, the Moroccan playmaker is suddenly being touted as an essential piece in Tuchel’s tactical game.

Football stars are people, too. And, like the rest of us, their temperament and personalities are overly influenced by their socio-cultural context. Sometimes, what the media reports as arrogance or indiscipline may miss the larger point of a clash of personalities inside a team. Some managers want their players to submit to their rigid tactics, while others allow players some freedom as long as they adhere to the basics of tactical discipline.

Likewise, some players are temperamentally happy, or disposed, to do whatever the coach thinks is best for the team. Others, more expressive, or independent-minded (or rebellious, depending on where you stand on the morality spectrum), are at their best when the coaching is flexible enough to allow them some freedom to express themselves.

Ziyech, like most talented players, is in the camp of those whose playing style requires some tactical flexibility. Which is why Halilhodzic’s stubbornness and intransigence was always going to create problems in that department. The Bosnian coach just does not seem to understand, or even care about, the level of compromise or diplomacy necessary to get the best out players of a certain stripe.

I expected, like many Moroccans, that the president of the FRMF would put pressure on Halilhodzic to reconcile with Ziyech and Mazraoui, taking into consideration the opinion of the Moroccan public.

Because he failed to do so, Ziyech’s forced retirement will remain a disgrace to the FRMF and those who allowed such a clueless and self-entitled coach to tarnish the reputation of, and cast doubt on the commitment of a player who could have been a starter in the Dutch national team but decided to play for Morocco instead.

Despite the slanderous attacks he received after his underwhelming performance at the 2019 AFCON, especially his missed penalty against Benin, Ziyech has been Morocco’s most creative and technical midfielder for the past four years.

As Atlas Lions fans strive to make sense of Ziyech’s retirement, with many of us hoping that the Chelsea star may change his mind and rejoin Morocco’s team, there will be a pre- and post-Ziyech and Mazraoui period for Morocco’s national football team. Seeing how the two players have been treated over the past months, many young, diaspora footballers considering joining the Moroccan national team may reconsider their decision in the future.

Samir Bennis is the co-founder of Morocco World News. You can follow him on Twitter @SamirBennis.