Morocco no longer continental pariah as Afcon showcases its global standing

Key Highlights

• “The pressure I was under can only be imagined, as I was pulled in different directions,” he later said.
• “It is a time I would like to forget.”Afcon roundup: Mohamed Salah strikes again as 10-man Egypt hold off South AfricaRead moreIt led to Morocco’s ban from the next two Afcons and punitive fines from Caf which were overturned at the court of arbitration for sport. That is a distant memory.
• Hosting the ongoing Afcon and the past two women’s Afcons – in 2022 and this year, with another Wafcon to be played there in March and April 2026 – and staging the 2030 men’s World Cup, primarily with Portugal and Spain, shows the north African country’s importance within world football.“Being in my 40s, I have been a witness to all the unsuccessful bids to host the World Cup,” says Amine El Amri, the head of sport at Le360 and one of Morocco’s most respected football journalists.
• “Hosting the World Cup is a project that engages every Moroccan in a common dream, knowing that a World Cup tournament comes at a cost but also with a huge boost to the infrastructure of a very young and very demanding society.”Omar Khyari, head of international relations at the Royal Moroccan Football Federation (FRMF), says forging close cultural, economic and diplomatic ties with the rest of Africa after the 2015 incident was a 2017 policy decision of King Mohammed VI, the country’s absolute monarch. Abderrahim Bourkia, a sports sociology professor at Hassan I University, goes further.
• “From a socioeconomic perspective, these tournaments are instruments of symbolic capital in the Bourdieusian sense, converted into political and economic capital.