Osame Sahraoui had been brought off the bench to safeguard a piece of history. His Lille were leading Real Madrid 1-0. Over the next 20 minutes he would contribute vitally to inflicting on the reigning European club champions their first defeat in 36 matches.
Sahraoui quickly put his stamp on an exhilarating Champions League contest. He’d been on the pitch five minutes, instructed to keep possession and threaten on the counter-attack. Back to goal, a little way inside the Lille half, he provided a deft cameo of how hard he can be to take the ball from. A neat pirouette spirited him away from a challenge from Madrid’s starlet Arda Guler and in the same smooth movement he eased clear of the veteran Luka Modric.
Seeing this, Jude Bellingham decided to play sheriff. With Guler and Modric left in his wake, Sahraoui had set off at pace towards Lille’s left flank. Bellingham chased, launching a thunderous sliding tackle. But Sahraoui’s feet were too quick, Bellingham booked for clattering, late, into the Lille man.
That was Wednesday night. Next morning, Sahraoui heard confirmation that his senior international career with Morocco was ready for lift-off, with his first call-up to Walid Regragui’s squad, following meetings between the Atlas Lions’ head coach and the player. There had been a complication to resolve because Sahraoui, born in Oslo to a family of Moroccan heritage, last year won a senior cap for Norway. That’s not enough to jeopardise his eligibility for Morocco, but there were the formalities of an official Fifa switch of national team to complete, a process the Moroccan Football Federation are well rehearsed in.
So it is that Sahraoui, who joined Lille in the summer – the latest step in a swift rise that has seen him move from Norway’s Valerenga to Heerenveen in the Netherlands and on to France and the Champions League all in the space of 18 months – has turned his back on the prospect of partnering Erling Haaland and Martin Odegaard in the international arena to instead compete for a spot in attacking midfield for Morocco. He’ll be jousting for minutes in the months and years to come with the likes of Hakim Ziyech, who chose Morocco over his native Holland; with Brahim Diaz, who elected to play for the Atlas Lions rather than Spain; with Amine Adli, ex of France’s under-21s; and with Bilal El Khannouss, who said no to the overtures of Belgium in order to fly the flag for Morocco.
The list goes on, and it will extend further as Morocco tirelessly ensures that all the best eligible footballers in Europe’s large Moroccan diaspora are offered the opportunity to be part of a project with evident momentum. Its strongest impulse was the epoch-making 2022 World Cup, when Regragui’s team reached the semi-finals, a best ever finish for an Arab or African team at football’s ultimate competition, and the big lure is the enticing diary ahead. Morocco will stage the next Africa Cup of Nations, in 14 months time. They are well on course to be at the 2026 World Cup and will jointly host the 2030 edition.
That distant horizon is very much in the minds of several younger footballers in the squad Regragui on Thursday named for this month’s matches, home and away, against Central African Republic, part of the Afcon qualifying programme, although, as hosts, Morocco are already guaranteed their spot in the finals. These games are thus an ideal opportunity for newcomers to gain competitive minutes. Besides Sahraoui, Adam Aznou, the 18-year-old full-back from Bayern Munich, has a chance to build on the full international debut he made last month, and there should be a first cap for Reda Belahyane, 20, the France-born midfielder who moved from Nice to Italy’s Verona earlier this year.
Regragui praised Belahyane by likening him, for his all-terrain industry, to Azzedine Ounahi, whose outstanding contributions at Qatar 2022 brought global attention. “Wow, where did this kid come from?,” exclaimed the then Spain head coach, Luis Enrique, after Ounahi had galvanised Morocco’s victory over his side at the last-16 stage. The answer was that Ounahi, like several of his star compatriots, emerged from the excellent Mohammed VI Academy, which remains as vital a source of talent for the national squad as all the European academies that have educated Morocco’s foreign-born players.
But nearly two years on, the pertinent question for Ounahi, and half a dozen of the feted World Cup players, is not so much where they came from, but where they have gone to since.
The answer to that is lengthy. One consequence of Morocco’s landmark success in Qatar was that their stand-out players attracted a stampede of transfer interest from leading clubs. A staggering number of that 2022 squad have changed employer since the tournament, sometimes more than once.
Ounahi left relegation-bound French club Angers for Marseille, but this summer Marseille loaned him to Panathinaikos. Sofyan Amrabat, Ounahi’s tireless midfield guardsman in Qatar, has fielded dozens of approaches, including from Barcelona. He eventually left Fiorentina for Manchester United, and then, in August, for Fenerbahce, both of those loan deals. At Jose Mourinho’s Fenerbahce, Youssef En-Nesyri, scorer of the goal that put Morocco in the last four of the World Cup, is now Amrabat’s colleague, having moved from Sevilla. Istanbul is also home to Ziyech, who endured the frustration of a move to Paris Saint-Germain falling through when his former club, Chelsea, failed to submit the required documents on time and he instead went to Galatasaray six months later.
All this movement has, at times, unsettled Regragui, who saw a clutch of his players preoccupied with possible winter transfers during last season’s Afcon, where a distracted Morocco fell short of expectations, knocked out before the quarter-finals.
It’s not clear that the movers’ trajectories have always been upwards, either. Ziyech, who along with Real Madrid’s Brahim is out of this month’s squad with injury, has lately struggled to command a first XI spot at Galatasaray. Amrabat had been keen to extend his stay at United, rather than join Fenerbahce. Ounahi was allowed to leave a Marseille who have begun the 2024/25 French league in fine form to join a club currently sitting eighth in the Greek top flight.
“The important thing for me is that they are playing regularly, and even if they haven’t joined clubs at the very top level, they are at big clubs,” said Regragui, who is largely loyal to the players who served him so valiantly in Qatar.
But he is also prepared to leave out stars. Amine Harit, of Marseille, who missed the World Cup with injury, is not included in his current squad. “He’s a player who wants to have a major role in the side and I don’t think will be happy with a place on the bench,” explained the Morocco head coach. “The door is always open to him but I have my vision and [for his midfield position] I have players of high potential in Ismael Saibari and El Khannouss.”
While El Khannouss has been used only sparingly by Leicester City, who he joined in August, Saibari, of PSV Eindhoven, is keeping elevated company. He has a goal to his name – against Juventus – already in this season’s Uefa Champions League, a competition where Eliesse Ben Seghir, the teenaged winger who rejected France’s approaches in order to play for Morocco, has also caught the eye for Monaco, notably in their victory over Barcelona.
On Wednesday it was Sahraoui’s turn, stylish and bold in Lille’s taming of Real Madrid on a special night for him and for his club colleague Ayyoub Bouaddi. He spent the evening of his 17th birthday battling with the likes of Modric and Bellingham and finishing on the winning side.
Bouaddi, born in France and an under-18 international for his native country, is also eligible for Morocco. He has plenty of time to decide on where he wants to commit his international future but Regragui has already been in touch, delivering a powerful, alluring message – that the Morocco teams of the long-term future look ever stronger than the 2022 version.
