Rabat – The Golden Boot conversation, as it almost always goes, opened with the same handful of names. Messi, Mbappé, Haaland and Vinícius. The players you always pencil in. And then, quietly, a 25-year-old from Morocco started scoring goals and simply refused to stop.
Before this tournament started, if you asked most football fans to name Morocco’s biggest threat going forward, you would probably get Hakim Ziyech. Maybe Achraf Hakimi. Maybe a shrug.
Nobody would be saying Ismael Saibari.
And yet here we are. Three games into the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the 25-year-old has scored in all of them, against Brazil, Scotland, and Haiti, and somehow finds himself mentioned in the same breath as Messi and Mbappé when people talk about the Golden Boot. It’s a strange sentence to read. But it’s true.
The Brazil goal was the one that turned heads. Morocco drew 1-1, which felt like a decent result, but the manner of Saibari’s finish, running in behind the defense, one-on-one with Alisson, lifting it over him like he’d done it a thousand times, was not what people expected from a player most neutrals had barely heard of.
Against Scotland, he did something even more impressive, scoring inside 70 seconds. Díaz slipped it through, Saibari didn’t break stride, and it was in the top corner before Angus Gunn had time to think. It was the fastest goal of the tournament at that point, and the quickest Morocco has ever scored at a World Cup.
The Haiti game was messier. Morocco were twice behind Haiti, and it took a late Rahimi goal and some genuine wobbling to get through 4-2. Saibari’s contribution was a 2-2 equalizer right on halftime, sweeping in a Hakimi cross, which at the time felt like a lifeline more than a statement. But it still counts.
Three games, three goals. First Moroccan ever to do it. First African player to score in each of his first three World Cup appearances. He’s also now the joint top scorer in Morocco’s entire World Cup history, on level with En-Nesyri.
Part of what makes this odd is that Saibari isn’t a natural striker. Head coach Mohammed Ouahbi pushed him higher up the pitch for this tournament, and he’s taken to it in a way that’s been almost unsettling to watch. He looks comfortable in spaces strikers are supposed to occupy. He finishes cleanly. He doesn’t seem nervous, which is the strangest thing of all, given the stage.
Off the pitch, he’s just completed a €55 million move to Bayern Munich, signed through 2031. So he heads into the knockout rounds already knowing he’ll be a Bundesliga player next season.
Messi still leads the Golden Boot race. Mbappé and Haaland remain lurking. But Saibari has done enough to make people check his name twice when they scroll the scoring charts, and enough to make them genuinely wonder whether he can keep going into the knockouts.
But the point isn’t really the Golden Boot. The point is that a player almost nobody discussed before June turned up at the biggest tournament in the world and scored in every single group game. That doesn’t happen very often. And it definitely wasn’t in anyone’s script.
