Morocco’s women’s team has already won

Khadija Ramici’s path to the Women’s World Cup began on a bike.

Remici, a goalkeeper, grew up in Khouribga, a mining town in central Morocco. As a girl, she tried many sports, including basketball, but she always got bored with it. She was often drawn instead to the football played by boys in the streets. Sometimes she just enjoyed watching the matches. For days, she couldn’t resist joining in, even when she knew it would mean trouble.

“It was a shame to play with the boys,” Rumichi, 33, said in an interview in April. “My older brother would beat me and drag me home, and I would go back out on the street to play whenever I got the chance.”

Local boss loved her spirit. He tells Remichi that if she finds enough girls to put together a team, he will train them. So she hopped on a bike and wandered the side streets and stadiums of Khouribga, looking for her teammates. When it was necessary, Rumichi said, she would take her sales pitch directly to the girls’ homes, helping convince reluctant parents and families to let them play.

“I tried to get into other sports,” she said, “but I just wanted to play soccer.”

The first team

One of eight first-time women’s World Cup qualifiers, Morocco may not win a match playing in a group that includes former champions (Germany), an Asian regular (South Korea) and South America’s second-best team (Colombia).

But the fact that Morocco is playing in this tournament, which started Thursday in Australia and New Zealand, and that its women’s team is already there, is a source of inspiration and a source of measurable pride at home and abroad.

Morocco is the first Women’s World Cup qualifier from North Africa, and the first from a majority Arab country. However, his team was little known even to most Moroccans before it hosted the event that was the continental World Cup qualifying tournament on home soil last July. Win after win, however, also recorded the country’s stadiums He started filling up with fansMany of them see the team play for the first time.

In a country where football is revered but interest in the women’s game is a new phenomenon, this success raised the team’s profile. “They showed us that they can fill stadiums and make Moroccans happy,” said French coach Reynald Pedro. They did it on the African stage. Now we hope to do the same internationally.”

Morocco’s presence in Australia this month is testament to efforts to develop women’s football in the country through government investment and a concerted effort to scout talent not only in cities like Rabat and Casablanca but also from the vast Moroccan diaspora in France, Spain, Britain and the Netherlands.

That versatility was on display on a cold but convivial night earlier this year in Prague, as the team came to face the Czech Republic in an exhibition match ahead of the World Cup. During the evening training session, Pedro gave instructions to the group in French, and the players shouted commands and encouragements to each other in a mixture of Arabic, French and English. An interpreter was standing by the field in case he was needed. For most drills, it wasn’t: most players at the time had ways of communicating even when they didn’t share a common language.

Their diverse paths were sometimes linked by similar threads. Sofia Bouvetni, a 21-year-old who grew up in Morocco, initially faced resistance from her family when she expressed her interest in taking football seriously. Like Rimichi, she fell in love with the sport playing against boys while longing to be part of a real team.

“My grandmother defended me and convinced my father,” she said. “My father was against it.” Bouvetni said he eventually relented when he realized how talented she was.

expectations

Sitting in his office this spring, Pedro, 51, warned that expectations for his team must remain realistic. The stakes for his team, qualifiers for the first time for women’s football’s biggest tournament, are not the same for the men’s team, which garnered widespread fans in December as it became the first African team to advance to the semi-finals.

Matching that milestone, Pedroz said, shouldn’t be the measuring stick this month. He said of his players, “It’s not a good thing to compare them to boys.”

He pointed out that the men of Morocco participated in international tournaments several times, before they climbed into the amazing race in Qatar, which produced cheers at home and praise almost everywhere. The stars of the men’s team work for some of Europe’s top clubs, and have long since learned how to perform on football’s biggest stages. For women, he said, everything will be new. Success will be defined by smaller steps. “There will not be 20,000 Moroccan fans in stadiums in Australia,” he said.

Playing the long game is something the nation’s sporting leaders seem to acknowledge. At the sprawling Mohammed VI Football Complex in Sale, near Morocco’s capital Rabat, are ultra-modern facilities built in 2009 where new generations of footballers are being groomed to become the champions of tomorrow.

But for those who started before such facilities were available, the road to elite football wasn’t always easy. For the players who came to the team after growing up in Europe, choosing Morocco was a complex matter of opportunity and identity. But even those who had better opportunities to learn the game and train in the European countries where they grew up admitted they often faced similar resistance from their families.

Nasreen El Chad, a 20-year-old central defender, grew up in Saint-Etienne, France, a city steeped in football. The daughter of Moroccan immigrants, she learned the game of playing against boys during recess when she was at school. When her family traveled to Morocco during the summer vacations, she said she would buy a ball at a store and play on the beach.

When she was 12, her parents realized she might be talented enough to have a future in football, so her mother enrolled her in a sports study program and made sure she was excused from some of the housework her siblings had to do, so she could rest on Sundays before matches. Her father, a black belt in karate, initially resisted the idea of ​​a football-focused future for Nasreen — until, she said, his mother asked him to let her play. He ended up taking her to every practice and every match, and is now one of her most ardent supporters.

She said it was never a question of what state colors she would wear if given the chance.

“I grew up feeling Moroccan,” she said. “I always wanted to play for Morocco.”

Voices from home

A few hours inside Lydnye Stadium in Chomutov, near the Czech Republic’s border with Germany, showed how contagious Morocco’s success has become for fans, at home and abroad, and how far the team still has to go.

The crowd who braved the cold to watch Morocco’s friendly in April were mostly Czechs, including a group of boisterous hockey fans who spilled within 30 minutes of the game after leaving a different event nearby. But there were also small pockets of Moroccans – mostly expats, some of whom had traveled more than 100 miles to attend. They were full of purpose and belonging, drawn by the desire to express love for the country in which they were born, and the need to share those feelings with others who would understand it. Gender was not important to them.

“For me, girls or boys, it’s all the same,” said Kamal Jabir, 59, who had come about 190 miles from Brno. “We came here because we wanted the girls not to feel lonely.”

Jabeur stood on his seat throughout the match chanting and chanting “Dima Maghreb” – always Morocco. His enthusiasm, while welcome, did little: Morocco lost to a Czech team that had not qualified for the World Cup. A few days later, it did the same against Romania, another disqualified nation, with a score of 1-0 in Bucharest. Rough nights can wait.

On Monday, Morocco will open its first World Cup finals with its toughest test yet: a date with Germany, one of the tournament’s favourites, in Melbourne. Players know their countrymen, and you’ll see their families wherever they are.

Central defender Chad said her grandfather used to watch all her matches from a favorite café in Morocco, where he liked to show off his granddaughter to his friends and neighbors.

Chad knows the joy games like the ones you’ll be playing this month can bring. She hurt her foot as she jumped for joy while watching one of Morocco’s men’s World Cup victories on TV. This month, it’s her team’s turn. She hopes to trigger similar feelings, though not similar injuries, regardless of the outcome.