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On a June afternoon in 2026, I watched Morocco’s opening World Cup match against Brazil from Tucson, Arizona, nearly six thousand miles from Casablanca. Yet distance felt strangely irrelevant.
As kickoff approached, messages began arriving from friends and relatives scattered across Morocco and far beyond it. A friend in Casablanca predicted a Moroccan victory. A relative in Rabat sent a photograph of a crowded café already filled with supporters. Another shared a short video from New York City where people had gathered hours before the match. Similar scenes were unfolding in Paris and Brussels, Amsterdam and Montréal, Errachidia and Milan. Across several continents, people were arranging their evenings around the same ninety minutes.
The game ended in a 1–1 draw. But the score was not what lingered. What stayed with me was the feeling that, for a brief moment, millions of people separated by geography, citizenship, language, and circumstance had entered the same emotional world. They worried together. Celebrated together. Complained about the referees together. Hoped together.
The global praise that followed focused not only on the result but also on the confidence, discipline, and imagination with which Morocco played, a reminder of how far the national team had travelled in less than two decades.
Four years earlier, during Morocco’s extraordinary run at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, something similar had happened on an even larger scale. For many Moroccans, it was the first time they saw the nation represented not only through victory, but through values they recognized as their own.
Anthropologists have long been fascinated by moments like these. Victor Turner called them communitas: fleeting intervals when ordinary distinctions lose their force, and people experience an intense sense of collective belonging. Turner was writing about pilgrimage and ritual, but he could just as easily have been describing football.
The anthropologist Max Gluckman understood this long before football became a respectable object of academic study. Born into a Jewish family in South Africa and later settled in Britain, Gluckman knew what it meant to live between worlds. It was perhaps for this reason that football fascinated him. Standing among supporters of Manchester United at Old Trafford, he observed how the game transformed strangers into a temporary community. Differences of nationality, religion, class, and origin receded before the simple fact of supporting the same team. For a few hours, the outsider became an insider. Football, he realized, was never merely a game. It was a social drama through which people experienced the possibility of belonging.
Yet football is not a ritual in the classical anthropological sense. No saints are invoked. No ancestors are summoned. No supernatural intervention is expected. Football is closer to what Gluckman called a ceremony: a repetitive public performance organized around symbols, rules, competition, and collective participation. And yet it often produces effects remarkably similar to ritual. It creates moments of transcendence, emotional intensity, and collective absorption.
If ritual connects people to the sacred, football connects people to one another.
Morocco is an especially revealing case because few countries combine such a large and globally dispersed diaspora, such dense networks of family connection, such a strategic position between Africa and Europe, and such sustained investment in football as a vehicle of national development. The game has become a meeting point where migration, kinship, aspiration, and national imagination converge.
In Morocco, football has become far more than a sport. It spills into cafés, marketplaces, living rooms, taxis, village squares, and social media feeds. Long before the first whistle blows, the match has already entered everyday life.
It is also an economy of hope. Every match begins with the possibility that the future may differ from both past and present. In an uncertain world, football remains one of the few arenas where collective hope can be publicly experienced and shared.
That hope unfolds against a backdrop of inequality. Contemporary Morocco is often described as a country moving at two speeds. Along the Atlantic corridor stretching from Tangier through Rabat and Casablanca to Marrakech, new highways, ports, industrial zones, and high-speed rail lines symbolize rapid development. Elsewhere, particularly in parts of the interior and the south, opportunities remain more uneven. Football cannot erase these disparities, but it has increasingly become one of the few institutions capable of generating shared experiences across social, regional, and economic divides.
Its recent successes are often attributed to talented players and good coaching. Yet behind these achievements lies a longer story. The contemporary transformation of Moroccan football can be traced to a strategic vision articulated by King Mohammed VI during the National Sports Conference of 2008. Rather than treating sport as a peripheral activity, the King positioned it as a domain of national development, youth formation, social integration, and international projection. The remarkable rise of Moroccan football over the past two decades is best understood as the outcome of this long-term royal vision.
Within this broader framework, Fouzi Lekjaa has played a pivotal role, not as the architect of the vision itself, but as one of its principal stewards and implementers. As president of the Royal Moroccan Football Federation, he has helped translate the King’s strategy into institutions, infrastructure, youth academies, technical programs, and professional standards. If the vision is royal, its realization has depended upon sustained efforts to transform aspiration into practice.
The most visible expression of this project is the Mohammed VI Football Complex outside Rabat. More than a training center, it functions as a physical statement of ambition, bringing together national teams, youth academies, coaches, medical specialists, and administrators within a single ecosystem. It is a place where the future of Moroccan football is imagined, organized, and continually renewed.
The forthcoming 2030 FIFA World Cup, which Morocco will co-host alongside Spain and Portugal, can be seen as the latest expression of this longer project. More than a sporting event, it represents an effort to position Morocco as a bridge between Africa and Europe, linking histories, geographies, and futures through the shared language of football.
Yet the story of Moroccan football extends far beyond Morocco itself. More than five million Moroccans live abroad, forming a vast transnational social world that stretches from villages and neighborhoods in Morocco to communities in Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris, Montréal, Madrid, New York, and countless other cities across the globe. Their remittances contribute roughly US$13 billion annually to the national economy, but their importance cannot be measured in economic terms alone.
The diaspora is not simply an audience for Moroccan football; it is one of its protagonists. It supplies players, supporters, ideas, and investment, while also sustaining the emotional ties that bind the national team to millions of Moroccans living beyond the Kingdom’s borders. In many ways, the Atlas Lions have become the most visible expression of a Morocco that extends far beyond Morocco itself.
During major tournaments, this dispersed population becomes unusually visible. A match watched simultaneously in Casablanca, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Montréal transforms geographic distance into emotional proximity. During the 2022 World Cup, something unexpected happened. From Dakar to Lagos and Cairo to Cape Town, many Africans adopted the Atlas Lions as their own, seeing in Morocco’s success the possibility of a broader African achievement on football’s biggest stage. The communitas generated by the tournament thus extended beyond the nation and its diaspora, encompassing wider solidarities that connected Morocco to the continent as a whole.
One of the enduring images of the 2022 World Cup was not a goal.
It was a son embracing his mother
After Morocco’s victories, Achraf Hakimi repeatedly climbed into the stands to celebrate with his mother. Soon he was joined by teammates doing much the same. Again and again, players disappeared into the crowd in search of parents, embracing mothers and fathers before cameras that seemed almost incidental to the moment. The images travelled around the world. To some, they were scenes of affection, gratitude, and pride. To many Moroccans, they felt instantly familiar.
What made these celebrations memorable was not their novelty but their recognizability. They reflected a moral world in which family remains a source of guidance, obligation, and blessing; a world shaped by migration, memory, and enduring ties to place. They also spoke to a deeply rooted recognition of riḍāʾ al-wālidayn, the blessing and approval of one’s parents, as a source of emotional balance and spiritual reassurance.
The federation itself recognized the importance of these ties. During the tournament, the presence of players’ parents was encouraged and facilitated, reflecting an understanding that familial proximity was not a distraction from elite performance but one of its foundations. In a sport increasingly dominated by data, analytics, and technology, Morocco’s success also rested on something less measurable: the emotional reassurance that comes from parental blessing and support.
For a brief moment, the distance between the stadium and the home, between the nation and the family, seemed to collapse. The victories belonged to the players, but they also belonged to parents, neighborhoods, villages, and journeys that had begun long before the tournament itself.
Many of these players were themselves children of migration, raised in Europe while remaining deeply connected to families, languages, memories, and places in Morocco. Their embraces spoke not only to kinship but also to the emotional geography of the Moroccan diaspora, revealing how football can reconnect lives lived across continents to a shared sense of origin and belonging.
Years earlier, the anthropologist Dale Eickelman described this world through the concept of qarāba. Often translated as kinship, qarāba extends beyond genealogy to encompass wider networks of relatedness, trust, obligation, and social closeness. In that moment, Morocco appeared less as an abstract political community than as a moral community rooted in enduring relationships.
More than a century ago, Émile Durkheim gave a name to such moments: collective effervescence. They occur when individuals become swept up in a larger social force and experience themselves as part of something greater than themselves. Anyone who has watched a decisive World Cup match knows the feeling. The crowd rises together. Hearts accelerate. Voices merge. Individual emotions become collective ones.
Victor Turner later described similar moments through the concept of communitas. Yet Morocco points toward something neither Durkheim nor Turner fully anticipated. The emotional intensity generated by football does not simply disappear once the match ends. It survives in family conversations, WhatsApp groups linking migrants to hometowns, summer visits, neighborhood debates, and memories shared across generations.
For this reason, I propose the notion of recurrent communitas: a form of collective belonging that is repeatedly renewed across time and space through football, migration, family networks, and media circulation. Unlike the singular pilgrimages and ritual moments that inspired Turner’s original formulation, football generates recurring cycles of connection that extend beyond the event itself. What appears fleeting is sustained through relationships, memories, and practices that reconnect individuals to one another across generations and continents.
If qarāba describes the intimacy of belonging, Tamghrabit names the larger world that such intimacies make possible. In recent years, the term has come to evoke a distinctly Moroccan way of imagining life together, one that accommodates difference without demanding uniformity and values plurality without abandoning collective attachment. It allows Amazigh, Arab, Jewish, and other communities; emigrants and residents; people of different beliefs, histories, and life trajectories to recognize themselves in a shared story. Diversity does not stand outside Tamghrabit; it is one of the conditions that sustains it.
Football has become one of the principal stages upon which this story is performed. It does not erase difference. It provides a framework within which difference can be connected to a larger sense of belonging.
Soon enough, every tournament comes to an end. The final whistle blows. Television screens go dark. Cafés empty. Flights depart for Brussels, Amsterdam, Montréal, Paris, and New York. People return to work. Political disagreements resume. Economic inequalities remain.
Yet something lingers
Back in Tucson, after the draw against Brazil, messages continued to arrive long after the match had ended. Friends analyzed tactics. Relatives debated substitutions. Supporters exchanged highlights and predictions for the next game. The conversation moved on, but the feeling remained.
For ninety minutes, millions of people scattered across continents had inhabited the same emotional world.
The unity was temporary. But it was real.
Perhaps that is why football matters so much. Not because it abolishes difference, but because it periodically reveals connections that everyday life often obscures. What begins as a game becomes a recurring act of recognition through which Moroccans, wherever they may live, are reminded not simply of who they are, but of the relationships, memories, and obligations that make them who they are.
For ninety minutes, Morocco appears less as a place on a map than as a network of relationships. A café in Errachidia, an apartment in Amsterdam, a living room in Montréal, a terrace in Casablanca, and a professor in Tucson inhabit the same conversation.
Perhaps this, ultimately, is what football makes visible: not merely a nation, but a shared world of connections stretching across families, cities, generations, and continents, a world that many Moroccans have long known by another name: Tamghrabit.
