The Moroccan women’s team has already won
Khadija Rmichi’s road to the Women’s World Cup started on a bicycle.
Rmichi, a keeper, 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 them. Instead, she was often attracted to the football played by boys on the street. Sometimes she just enjoyed watching the games. For days she couldn’t resist participating, even though she knew it would cause problems.
“It was considered a disgrace to play with boys,” Rmichi, now 33, said in an April interview. “My older brother beat me and dragged me home, and I just went back to the streets to play whenever I got the chance.”
A local coach loved her ghost. He told Rmichi that if she could find enough girls to form a team, he would train them. So she got on her bike and toured Khouribga’s side streets and playgrounds, looking for teammates. When necessary, Rmichi said, she took her sales pitch straight to the girls’ homes, convincing unwilling parents and families to let them play.
“I tried other sports,” she said, “but I just wanted to play football.”
A team of firsts
As one of the top eight qualifiers in the women’s World Cup field, Morocco may not win a match in a group made up of a former champion (Germany), a regular in Asia (South Korea) and the second best team in South America (Colombia).
But the fact that Morocco is participating in this tournament, which began on Thursday in Australia and New Zealand, and that the women’s team exists at all, serves as an inspiration and a measurable source of pride at home and abroad.
Morocco is the first women’s World Cup qualifier from North Africa and the first from a predominantly Arab country. Yet the squad was little known even to most Moroccans before hosting the event that served as the continent’s World Cup qualifier on home soil last July. Because it took victory after victory, however, the country’s stadiums began to fill with fansmany of them see the team play for the first time.
In a country where soccer is revered but where interest in women’s games is a new phenomenon, that success raised the profile of the team. “They showed us that they can fill stadiums and make Moroccans happy,” said the team’s French coach Reynald Pedros. “They did it on the African stage. Now we hope to do the same at the international.”
Morocco’s presence in Australia this month is a testament to efforts to develop women’s football in the country through public investment and a concerted effort to find talent not only in cities like Rabat and Casablanca, but also in the vast Moroccan diaspora in France, Spain, Britain and the Netherlands.
That diversity was on display on a cold but joyful night earlier this year in Prague, where the team took on the Czech Republic in a pre-World Cup exhibition game. During evening practice, Pedros gave instructions to the group in French and the players shouted orders and encouragement to each other in a mix of Arabic, French and English. An interpreter stood by the field in case he was needed. For most of the drill, he wasn’t: most players had by then established ways to communicate, even if they didn’t share a common language.
Their different paths were sometimes connected by similar threads. Sofia Bouftini, a 21-year-old who grew up in Morocco, was initially met with resistance from her family when she expressed an interest in taking football more seriously. Like Rmichi, she had fallen in love with the sport playing against boys as she longed to be part of a real team.
“My grandmother pleaded for me and convinced my father,” she said. “My father was against it.” He finally gave in, Bouftini said, when he realized how talented she was.
Expectations
Pedros, 51, sat in his office this spring and warned that expectations for his team must remain realistic. The commitment to his side, which qualified for the biggest championship in women’s football for the first time, is not the same as the men’s team, which gained admirers far and wide in December when it became the first African team to progress to the semi-finals.
Matching that performance shouldn’t be the benchmark this month, Pedros said. “Comparing them to the boys,” he said of his players, “is not a good thing.”
Morocco’s men had competed in international tournaments many times, he noted, before embarking on Qatar’s stunning run caused cheers home and praise almost everywhere else. Employed by some of Europe’s best clubs, the stars of the men’s team have long learned how to perform on football’s biggest stages. For the women, he said, it will all be new. Success is marked in smaller steps. “There will not be 20,000 Moroccan supporters in the stadiums in Australia,” he said.
Playing the long game is something the country’s sports leaders seem to recognize. At the sprawling Mohammed VI football complex in Salé, close to Morocco’s capital, Rabat, state-of-the-art facilities built in 2009 are preparing the new generations of footballers to become the champions of tomorrow.
But for those who started before such facilities were available, the road to elite football was not 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 and train the game in the European countries where they grew up acknowledged that they often faced similar resistance from their families.
Nesryne El Chad, a 20-year-old central defender, grew up in Saint-Étienne, France, a city steeped in football. As the daughter of Moroccan immigrants, she learned to play the game against boys during recess when she was in school. When her family traveled to Morocco during summer vacations, she said she would buy a ball in a store and play on the beach.
When she was 12, her parents realized that she might be talented enough to have a future in football, so her mother enrolled her in sports training and made sure she was exempted from some of the household chores her siblings had to do so that she could rest on Sunday before the game. Her father, a black belt in karate, initially resisted the idea of a soccer-focused future for Nesryne — until, she said, his own mother told him to let her play. He ended up taking her to every practice and game, and is now one of her most ardent supporters.
It was never a question, she said, of which country she would wear the colors given the chance.
“I was raised Moroccan,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to play for Morocco.”
Voices from home
A few hours at the Ledni stadium in Chomutov, close to the Czech 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 that braved the cold to watch Morocco’s April friendly was mostly Czechs, including a group of loud, drunk hockey fans who spilled into the game within 30 minutes of leaving another event nearby. But there were also small groups of Moroccans – mostly expats, some of whom had traveled more than 100 miles to attend. They were filled with purpose and connection, drawn by the urge to express love for the country where they were born, and the need to share that feeling with others who would understand. Gender mattered little to them.
“For me, girls or boys, it’s all the same,” said Kamal Jabeur, 59, who had come about 300 kilometers from the city of Brno. “We came here because we wanted the girls not to feel alone.”
Jabeur remained in his seat throughout the game, cheering and singing: “Dima Maghrib” – Always Morocco. His enthusiasm, while welcome, only did so much: Morocco lost to a Czech team that failed to qualify for the World Cup. A few days later, it did the same against Romania, another non-qualifier, 1-0 in Bucharest. Rough nights may lie ahead.
Morocco will open its first World Cup on Monday with its toughest test to date: a date against Germany, one of the tournament’s favourites, in Melbourne. The players know their compatriots and their families wherever they are will be watching.
El Chad, the central defender, said her grandfather has made it a habit to watch all her matches from a favorite café in Morocco, where he likes to brag about his granddaughter to his friends and neighbours.
El Chad knows the joy that games like the one she will play this month can bring. She injured her foot while watching one of Morocco’s victories in the men’s World Cup on television. This month it’s her team’s turn. She hopes to induce similar feelings, but not similar injuries, regardless of the outcome.