When Morocco’s winning penalty hit the back of the net, the crowd inside Zikrayat, a Middle Eastern restaurant and lounge in Astoria, erupted in cheers. People danced in celebration and the high-pitched, howling trill of a zaghrouta pierced the air.
It had been a tense game between Morocco and the Netherlands in Monterrey, Mexico, on June 29. Moments earlier, our audience of dozens of Morocco fans, most wearing the team’s red jersey, had braced themselves for defeat. The North African team trailed until a miraculous equalizer in the ninetieth minute forced extra time. As the shootout began, several Moroccan players gathered in a circle on the pitch, raising their hands and reciting a religious prayer. Inside Zikrayat, time had stopped as a few lowered their heads and bated their breath while others stared at the screen anxiously. When Ismael Saibari’s goal finally settled the game, relief gave way to euphoria. Outside, fireworks exploded over Queens.
“I don’t know the concept of the game,” said Fouzia Michel, who I had watched the game with, told me earlier, laughing. “I know the basics. I know what a goal is.” She drove in that Monday from River Edge, New Jersey, with neighbors to watch the match. She wore a Moroccan jersey, had Moroccan flags painted on her cheeks, smoked hookah, drank juice, and was intensely focused on the screen for the entire game. When Morocco won, she cried. As we celebrated outside, she confided in me that the fireworks brought back memories of her father, Jimmy Elidrissi, who passed away two days after the Fourth of July five years ago. Born in Temara, near Rabat, Elidrissi immigrated to New York as a young man and spent more than five decades working as a bellhop at the Waldorf Astoria. Fouzia was born and raised in Queens, and Morocco existed in her life only tangentially—family gatherings, well-worn stories, and occasional visits. And then, of course, came the national football team.
“When I hear the anthem, it’s so powerful,” she said. “I don’t know exactly what they are saying, but I know that it is great.” Fouzia’s love for the country became a love for the squad. Having qualified for each successive World Cup since Russia 2018, Morocco’s Atlas Lions have transformed into something closer to a powerhouse than a dark horse, at least in the early rounds. At the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, Morocco was the first African team to make it into the semifinal in the tournament’s history. A charismatic, cheerful squad, the team quickly became beloved to Moroccans in the diaspora.
Earlier in the tournament, I spent an afternoon on Steinway Street on the day of Morocco’s opening game against Brazil. Hours before kickoff, the neighborhood began to turn red and green. More and more people stepped off the M60 bus wearing Morocco jerseys. Achraf Hakimi’s name seemed to be everywhere (his image largely untouched by the rape trial awaiting him in France). Men sold flags and scarves from folding tables on the sidewalk, shouting “Dima Maghrib!”—“Always Morocco!”—at passing cars, while others had flags wrapped around their shoulders. A travel agency had covered its storefront windows with photographs of Moroccan players. Moroccan flags hung from businesses and fluttered from car windows.
Inside Noisette, one of the neighborhood’s busy cafes, some people stood in clusters, others (mostly women) sat at crowded tables, indulged in mint tea and pastries, and stared at a television screen. I could hear Darija, or Moroccan Arabic, spoken through the room. A woman, sitting across from a man dressed in a red tarbouche (a cylindrical felt hat), watching footage from MetLife stadium—the stands there only lightly pocked with red—commented that there was “no comparison with the audience in Qatar,” where there had been a strong showing of Moroccan fans. A man told me he had driven in from Philadelphia after dropping off his children at the game in New Jersey, preferring to watch it from Queens. Others had gone to MetLife hoping to catch a glimpse of the team without paying stadium prices. So, after some disappointments, Astoria, this small clot of North Africa in the northern hemisphere, had naturally become the fan zone of choice.
Some watched the game on television and their phones at the same time, afraid one feed might lag behind the other. When I suggested to one man that the people watching on their phones might spoil the game for those of us watching the broadcast, he dismissed me with a shrug: “You will hear cheers anyway.”
Every few years or so, I find myself writing about sports in Morocco. It wouldn’t take a witness to the scene in Queens long to understand that all these big, feverish reactions that the World Cup brings forth are accompanied by a certain diasporic melancholia. (A Dutch–Moroccan acquaintance and die-hard fan told me that the Netherlands–Morocco game left him feeling “that one part of my heart was happy and one part of my heart was bleeding.”)
Statistically speaking, it is almost always the same countries that reach the final stages of the World Cup. In the last four decades, there have only been two first-time winners: France in 1998 and Spain in 2010. Before Morocco’s unexpected semifinals run in 2022, many of us experienced the tournament vicariously, watching and rooting for the wealthier, more powerful countries who consistently outperform everyone else and feeling a twinge of injustice when you come from a place where football is everywhere. One of my own earliest memories of the World Cup is of the penalty shootout between Italy and Brazil in 1994, which Brazil won. I remember rooting for Italy that night because they were objectively the most handsome team and then, four years later, rooting for Brazil against France for some equally trivial reason.
The Moroccan team that has emerged over the past decade complicated things. Several of the players are truly exceptional talents and have been trained in European academies and played in European leagues, both among the best in the world. That stronger pool translated into the team achieving greater results than it has in its entire history: a historic (though not uncontroversial) return to the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON), and now three fiercely memorable World Cup runs, two of which broke saw the team break into the quarterfinals. But in 2018, Morocco’s return to the World Cup after a twenty-year absence was initially met with as much criticism as excitement. Many of the players, to mainland Moroccans’ discontent, did not speak Arabic and didn’t grow up in Morocco, a majority of them having been born elsewhere to diaspora families (Achraf Hakimi in Madrid, Sofyan Amrabat and Hakim Ziyech in the Netherlands). Moroccans doubted their dedication and their zeal. Seventeen players out of twenty-three on the 2018 squad were born outside of the country. This year, that number is nineteen out of twenty-six.
“The team [has become] a metaphor for the Moroccan economy and Moroccan society,” Aboubakr Jamaï, a prominent Moroccan journalist and public intellectual, told me. “We rely heavily on our emigrants. Remittances play an enormous role in the country’s economy. Football tells a similar story.” Since 2024, Moroccans living abroad have sent home nearly $13 billion in remittances, roughly 8 percent of the country’s GDP. As Morocco’s diaspora grows, so does the country’s economy. That money pays for rent, food, healthcare, extra expenses, and arguably sustains Morocco’s economy as much if not more than some of its largest domestic sectors. Leaving Morocco doesn’t mean definitive exile, either. Seasonal returns, economic investments encouraged through a wide set of incentives to dual nationals, and cultural accomplishments, make the diaspora an inextricable part of Morocco.
Just like entire communities of people depend on their families abroad, the national team too has become dependent on the diaspora. Jamaï, who is based in Madrid and is a huge football fan, explained that the Moroccan national team has been heavily criticized for its use of training and scouting systems built in Europe. But what it managed to achieve and build, he explained, was a system capable of identifying, recruiting, and retaining those players: The professionalism, training facilities, and Moroccan state infrastructure offered have helped make the choice of national team for superstars like Hakimi, who was raised in Spain by Moroccan parents. A key figure here is Nasser Larguet, who led Salé’s Mohammed VI Football Academy before becoming the technical director of Morocco’s national team, where he helped build the overseas scouting network used to identify talented players in the Moroccan diaspora. Today, Larguet is doing similar work in Saudi Arabia.
At the 2022 World Cup, Walid Regragui, the Moroccan coach who took the team to the semifinals, gave the players a storied pregame talk. “You chose Morocco, why? For your parents! Don’t lie,” he told them. “You need to fight to the death [for them].” In addition to historically serving as the country’s most effective cultural ambassador, the Moroccan diaspora now sends their talented children back to play—and win—for the team of their homeland.
The national team’s meteoric rise reflects years of planning and millions of dollars in investments in finding talent abroad and developing sporting infrastructure at home, all of which was carried out against a backdrop of grossly neglected social welfare in Morocco itself. Protests shook the country last fall as Gen Z activists urged the state to prioritize the basic needs—healthcare, education, employment—of its youth rather than sinking huge portions of the state budget into sportswashing and prestige projects. In more of a PR stunt than a conciliatory gesture, a small group among the hundreds of jailed protesters were released on the eve of the game against Brazil after being convicted and sentenced to time already served. The protests did little to alter the course of events—Morocco is officially a World Cup co-host for 2030.
As Morocco entered the Cup in a climate of political repression and discontent at home, the tide seem to turn for the team too. A dramatic transformation in the Atlas Lions’ public image took place during the most recent AFCON tournament, hosted in Rabat this past winter, with the final engulfed in controversy: a controversial penalty given to Morocco; Senegal’s brief walkout in protest; a goal in extra time that secured a Senegalese victory; and a prolonged legal battle over the walkout that ultimately awarded the title to Morocco two months later. In Qatar, Morocco had been the world’s underdog, a team that could represent the Global South, its players defiantly raising the Palestinian flag after their semifinal loss. Four years later at AFCON, Morocco acted more like a regional power, its dominance inspiring more suspicion than admiration.
The heightened expectations of newfound primacy on the pitch followed the team into this summer. After a difficult match against the Netherlands and a comfortable victory over Canada, the team again faced their 2022 semifinal rivals, France, albeit this time in the quarterfinals. Just like last time, we lost. But this time there was little of the magic of the team’s unexpected run in Qatar. Facing France, Morocco looked completely absent (despite “Disney Prince” goalkeeper Yassine Bounou’s heroic game), creating hardly any chances and failing to finish the few that they did. France won 2–0.
The defeat itself was hardly surprising, France being one of the tournament’s presumptive favorites. What many Moroccans are struggling to forgive was the feeling that the team had stepped onto the pitch already resigned to losing. Supporters can accept defeat, but they expect the team to fight. Moreover, reaching the quarterfinals no longer feels like it’s enough. Past the stage of just being content to participate, Moroccans now have genuine ambitions for their team. Did people forget how they feel about non-Arabic-speaking players when we became a winning team? Was popular anger at the team just a pretext to explain a losing streak? Why was the diaspora rooting for a team whose social prominence Moroccans themselves were protesting? Asking these questions, I find myself feeling the urge to explain to readers—and also to myself—what it means to be Moroccan.
Observing the crowd in Queens, I felt myself to be in many places at once. Growing up in Morocco means either leaving yourself, having several family members who do, or at the very least hearing constantly about other people who are trying to leave themselves. Unlike many of the people around me watching the World Cup in Astoria, I was born in Morocco, but, like them, I now experience the country from afar, having left the country at 18 and spent most of my adult life abroad. Distance has changed my relationship to home, and I find myself feeling, in endlessly repeating cycles, the ambivalent aches of frustration, longing, and gratitude. To cope, I try to recreate Moroccan life abroad: staying close to my family, building community with my neighbors, holding on to a way of life that still feels familiar and warm.
I watched the match against the Netherlands with my second cousin, Sofia, as we cheered and squeezed each other’s hands throughout the game. Born in New York to a family that immigrated generations ago, she grew up knowing Morocco only through family traditions, stories, and the occasional visit to Astoria’s Little Morocco restaurant. As she got older, she sought a deeper connection: She wanted to hear Darija, to learn about relatives’ trips home. Eventually, she took her mother’s Moroccan surname, Kabbaj, before finally traveling to Morocco herself at the age of 20. Sofia told me she roots passionately for the national team because “being Moroccan is a part of these players, no matter where they were born.”
In no place does being this kind of Moroccan this feel easier than Astoria. As the street celebrations on Steinway were beginning to wind down, we started walking away, fireworks still going off behind us. We were still thinking about the penalties, still texting with friends and family around the world, still euphoric. That summer night, as shouts, bursts, and cries echoed loudly above Steinway and people danced in celebration, the team—transnational, contradictory, at times exalting, at times disappointing, but always passionate—seemed like one of the greatest reflections of the people themselves.
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