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Rabat – At a time of overwhelming support for Morocco’s Atlas Lions, Spanish news outlet La Vanguardia is choosing a provocative approach in commenting on the much-anticipated Morocco vs Spain round of 16 game.
La Vanguardia published yesterday an analysis titled “Spain against the UN team,” referencing the different birthplaces of some Moroccan players.
“Morocco, with 14 players born outside the country, is the team with the most ‘foreigners,’” La Vanguardia wrote, noting that 137 of the 832 football players called up by the 32 teams qualified for the 2022 World Cup do not represent the country where they were born.
Emphatically putting its focus on the case of the Moroccan national football team, the analysis, written by Toni Lopez Jorda, claimed that Morocco is a “true UN team with up to 14 foreign footballers born outside Moroccan territory.”
It went on to tell the story of how, according to Jorda, Moroccan head coach Walid Regragui avoided taking Bilal El Khannous, a Belgium-born midfielder, to the press conference prior to Morocco’s match against the Belgian team.
The Moroccan coach’s supposedly preemptive decision was aimed at protecting El Khannouss against the barrage of questions he would have faced about ditching Belgium, his country of birth, to instead play for Morocco.
“Something similar could happen to Ez Abde on Tuesday when he faces Spain, the country that welcomed him at the age of four, and with whose team it seemed he was going to play,” the Spanish news outlet wrote.
But what the Spanish news outlet chose to ignore or dismiss is that the majority of the Atlas Lions who have chosen to represent Morocco instead of their countries of birth were born to Moroccan parents.
Ignored for big occasions
La Vanguardia also failed to mention that many players of Moroccan descent who chose to represent their countries of birth ended up either benched indefinitely or not being called up at all for important matches.
The story of Munir El Haddadi is a case in point.
Having initially elected to choose the Spanish national team over the Moroccan Atlas Lions, El Hadadi only played one international game for Spain (against Macedonia in 2014). He was then relegated to the bench for years, and was never called up to be part of Spain’s squad for major tournaments.
In 2018, with his international career left in limbo for years, a frustrated El Haddadi finally expressed his interest and hope to represent Morocco instead of Spain.
But his participation in the 2014 Macedonia-Spain game made his potential shift of allegiances a very complicated card to pull off — for both the Atlas Lions and Morocco’s football federation.
Only after FIFA announced a series of internal reforms about football players’ eligibility for national teams in June 2021 was El Haddadi finally allowed to represent Morocco.
Like El Haddadi, several other football players who chose to represent countries other than Morocco were also left without chances to appear in big competitions, such as the World Cup. One such player is the young, once-hailed creative midfielder Mohamed Ihattaren.
In November 2019, the Moroccan-Dutch football player decided to represent the Netherlands.
As the Dutch federation had actively campaigned to discourage Ihatteren from choosing to play for Morocco, the young midfielder obviously hoped to be called up to the Dutch team. But he was simply ignored when the time came to select the Netherlands’ team for both Euro 2020 and the ongoing World Cup.
For much of the past decades, that experience of being indefinitely benched or simply ignored on big occasions has long been seen as the main reason dual nationality players’ end up playing for their parents’ country.
Recently, however, an increasingly pertinent reason for future players to opt for their parents’ country is what some observers have called the democratization of football. At the ongoing World Cup, the sudden realization has been that football has remarkably developed in almost all countries, and that teams that have long been deemed inferior can now compete with, and beat, the usual “favorite” or “big” teams.
Before the World Cup, the consensus among football pundits was that Morocco would not make it out of a group that included Belgium (ranked second in the FIFA rankings) and Croatia (the runners up of the 2018 World Cup).
But not only did the Atlas Lions make it out of that “group of death,” they actually qualified in style by deservedly topping their group.
‘We Don’t Care’
Morocco’s Atlas Lions will play against Spain at 16:00 Moroccan time on Tuesday. The match will be the first time the Atlas Lions have reached the round of 16 since the 1986 World Cup in Mexico.
Addressing the challenge of facing a highly rated Spanish team, head coach Walid Regragui dismissed La Vanguardia’s provocative analysis as pre-match noise. As their only focus is to win their next game and continue to make Moroccans happy, he said, the Atlas Lions do not care “what the Spanish media is talking about.”
He added: “It is a football match, the players know what they have to do, talking about what a newspaper [said] does not fall within our interest, because we are Moroccans, with a green Moroccan passport, we will play against a team among the best in the world, and it will be a party on the field.”
