How does a club, an aristocrat of its domestic league, a heavyweight of its region respond to its worst league season for 17 years? It scours the transfer market and, in the case of Iran’s Esteghlal, it reaches deep into all known corners of it.
The Tehran giants, who begin their AFC Champions League Two campaign against Al Wasl in Dubai on Wednesday, have been very busy indeed over the summer.
For a start, they have a new manager, Ricardo Sa Pinto, who is returning to the role. Such has been the turnaround in the two years between Sa Pinto concluding his first spell with Esteghlal and beginning his second, seven others took charge of the first team in between.
All of them had a short stab at rescuing a 2024/25 season that petered towards a ninth-placed finish in the Persian Gulf League, the club’s worst placing since 2007/08.
They owe their participation in the second tier of Asian competition to the Hazfi Cup triumph that put a light gloss on an otherwise gloomy campaign.
At which point, in came Clarence Seedorf, in an advisory role to the club’s executives and with him, a worldliness reflected in the extensive summer recruitment.
Seedorf was a record-breaking midfielder in the 1990s and early 2000s, owner of 87 caps for the Netherlands and of European Cup-winning medals for Ajax, Real Madrid and AC Milan.
He is an eloquent authority on football from Europe to South America and of sites as far apart as China and Cameroon, two stops on a coaching CV that also included a stint at Milan and in Spain’s top division.
The squad Sa Pinto now oversees has a similar global reach. Among the parade of new signings is Albanian winger Jasir Asani, whose nine goals for Gwangju in last season’s AFC Champions League Elite were scored at a ratio close to one every game.
Centre-forward Duckens Nazon, the all-time leading marksman for Haiti. The 27-year-old Mali winger Moussa Djenepo, who spent four seasons with Southampton in the English Premier League in between adventures in Turkey and Belgium.
Defender Rustam Ashurmatov, a key contributor to Uzbekistan’s historic qualification for the 2026 World Cup.
There’s an ex-Real Madrid goalkeeper, Antonio Adan, whose long career across Iberia includes a Uefa Super Cup winners’ medal as well as league titles in Spain and Portugal.
And there’s a former Barcelona star, Munir El Haddadi, who won the European Cup as a teenager and whose storied journey notched up an unusual badge-of-honour having registered goals in Spain’s top division for seven different clubs.
El Haddadi is a pioneer, too, a pathfinder for many footballers of his generation and of generations to come. His legacy as a determined mould-breaker may well come to be remembered for longer than his many achievements on the pitch.
He’s the man who gave his name to what is sometimes known as ‘The Munir Rule,’ an important change in Fifa regulations governing at what point players with dual nationality could switch from one country to another for senior international football.
El Haddadi was born in Madrid, the son of a Moroccan father and a mother from Melilla, the Spanish enclave in North Africa. His talent as a schoolboy was exceptional, and, having been courted by Barcelona and enrolled in their celebrated La Masia academy at 16, he rose fast.
“He burned his way through the steps up the ladder at a speed that’s hard to manage,” remarked Luis Enrique, the Barca coach who promoted the 18-year-old El Haddadi to a first team that already had Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez and Neymar in its forward line.
He promptly scored on his Liga debut. He finished that season, 2014/15, with a European Cup, Liga and Copa del Rey treble.
Amid the gathering hype around Munir The Wunderkind, he was rushed into the Spain team, a confusing moment, as he later recalled.
He had been with the under-21s, and an injury to Diego Costa, Spain’s then centre-forward, ahead of a European Championship qualifier against Macedonia led the coach, Vicente Del Bosque, to summon El Haddadi to the seniors.
“There was such pressure,” El Haddadi, who had already been contacted by the Moroccan Football Federation about a possible international future with the Atlas Lions. “I was in tears because of it.” Del Bosque put El Haddadi on the bench but fielded him for the last 13 minutes against Macedonia.
He never played again for Spain, and as he built his club career, from in-and-out of the team at Barca, to loans at Alaves and Valencia as well as a happy and successful period at Sevilla, he yearned to represent the land of his heritage, Morocco.
But the rules on international switches then stated that those 13 minutes in a competitive game, as a bewildered teenager, for Spain, meant no switch would ever be allowed.
Del Bosque sympathised. Some international managers, especially in Europe, have in the past fast-tracked young dual-nationals into the senior team to stop them from committing to another country.
That had not been Del Bosque’s intention. “I feel guilty,” Del Bosque later said, “because for playing less than 15 minutes, he was given this burden. To my mind, there should have been flexibility to let him play for Morocco. We left him with so much work to do.”
That work involved several rounds of confrontation with Fifa to lighten its rules. El Haddadi and Morocco’s challenges kept being rebuffed. They appealed. They went as high up as the international Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Eventually, in 2020, Fifa amended it rules, so that a footballer who had made fewer than three senior appearances for one country could, provided he had eligibility to be a citizen of another, switch permanently, as long as he had not represented the first country in a major tournament.
The new rules have some other fine details, but essentially, the ‘Munir Rule’ had been the game-changer.
It has been significant for several players of Mena heritage, post-2020, who have weighed up the choice to play for Middle Eastern or North African national teams or the European country of their birth.
But for El Haddadi, there remains the feeling that the yields of his long battle came too late. He had taken on Fifa with a view to going to the 2018 World Cup with Morocco. The old rules prevented that.
By the time Morocco were embarking on their 2022 World Cup run – all the way to the semi-final – El Haddadi, who won 11 caps after his long-awaited 2021 Atlas Lions debut, had fallen out of contention, Morocco having strengthened their attacking options with several dual-nationals.
He turned 30 two weeks ago. That is still young enough to aspire to an international recall, and it gives El Haddadi plenty of time to galvanise a new-look Esteghlal and make a lasting impact in the new place he now calls home.
