Global Courant
Imagine being the only person in a stadium who doesn’t know that your country has just won the greatest game in its history. Now imagine that you are also the person who scored the goal to win that game.
Rosella Ayane doesn’t have to. When she scored in the Moroccan Women’s Africa Cup of Nations (WAFCON) semi-final penalty shootout against Nigeria last year, she calmly turned around and began trudging back to the halfway line to rejoin her teammates.
It wasn’t until those teammates harassed her that she realized what she had done and her confusion turned to joy.
“It was a bit blurry, to be honest,” she said after the game. “I didn’t even know it was the winning penalty. I had no idea!”
That semi-final win was the culmination of the Atlas Lionesses’ meteoric rise that took them from the fringes of football in Africa to their first World Cup in the span of a few years.
Just a few days after that victory against Nigeria, more than 50,000 fans filled the Prince Moulay Abdallah Stadium in Rabat, and thousands more camped outside to try to see the country’s first appearance in a continental final since the men’s team reached the AFCON final 18 years earlier.
And while the team fell short in a 2-1 defeat to South Africa, it was a statement to the world that Morocco’s women’s football was ready to put its shoulders to the best.
Now, with the men’s team’s success at the World Cup in Qatar – where they became the first African and Arab country to reach the semi-finals – and the Atlas Lionesses as the first Arab country to qualify for a Women’s World Cup, excitement in Morocco is mounting.
Humble start
Twenty-five years before the 2022 WAFCON Final, the country took its first steps into women’s football.
Nawal El Moutawakel – who became the first Moroccan, African and Muslim woman to win an Olympic gold medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics – had recently been appointed as the Secretary of State to the Minister of Social Affairs, responsible for youth and sports, and had big plans for women’s football in the country.
With her support, the very first women’s team was formed in 1997 and Karim Bencharifa was appointed as head coach.
“Of course there were no competitions. It was just clubs that were amateur,” Bencharifa told Al Jazeera. “When we invited girls for trials, about 250 girls showed up.”
Bencharifa, who would also take charge of the Atlas Lionesses for a second time from 2017 to 2019, had to cut that 250 down to 23 before playing an exhibition game against a visiting team from Sweden.
“I was not surprised by the turnout and support (at the WAFCON) because in 1997 the first game we played was a friendly against the team from Sweden. We had about 40,000 in that same stadium in Rabat,’ recalls the current Singapore national coach.
Bencharifa’s Morocco went on to qualify for a first-ever WAFCON in 1998, but the team would disappoint in back-to-back tournaments, failing to make it out of the group stage in both 1998 and 2000, losing to heavy hitters Nigeria 8-0 and 6-0.
When El Moutawakel left her post in 1998, support for the team dried up and it would take more than 20 years for the Atlas Lionesses to reach the heights they have now climbed.
Morocco’s football revolution
Nearly two decades after its foundation, women’s football in Morocco had made little progress.
Although a league system was set up, there was no single national division and club football was dominated by AS FAR Rabat, the only men’s club to invest meaningfully in a women’s club.
The national squad was made up almost entirely of AS FAR players and would meet only a few times a year to play in qualifiers that they would inevitably lose.
But even as the team was at its lowest ebb, the seeds of change were already being planted to transform women’s football in the country.
In 2014, a new president of the Royal Moroccan Football Federation (FRMF), Fouzi Lekjaa, was appointed with the support of the government to transform football in the kingdom.
With the establishment of the Mohammed VI Academy in 2009 and the development of an associated training complex imminent, the infrastructure for developing Moroccan talent was well underway, but initially the focus was almost entirely on the men’s side.
“(Lekjaa) spent a lot of time alone on the men’s side in 2014,” said Khadija Illa, then president of club AMFF Laayoune and now head of Morocco’s national women’s league. “I met him four times and I would say to him, ‘Please take care of women’s football. After a year, please Lekjaa, we need your help.'”
Lekjaa listened and in 2017 the Atlass Lionesses were reborn.
Bencharifa, 20 years after coaching the original team, was reappointed as head coach and took charge of the team until 2019. In addition to the senior team, a national U-20 and U-17 were formed and players from the wide Moroccan diaspora were approached to play for the kingdom.
In 2019, the federation launched a fully professional national football league and a regional second tier. They pledged to pay the salaries of 25 players per team and eight staff, including U-17 and U-15 coaches, for 42 clubs across the country, making Morocco the first country in the world to have two levels of professional women’s football.
WAFCON and beyond
The latest addition to the Atlas Lionesses and perhaps the biggest sign of their ambition was the appointment of Reynald Pedros as head coach in 2020.
The former France international was known as a player for missing the final penalty in Les Blues’ shootout defeat to the Czech Republic at Euro 1996.
But he became an elite coach in the women’s game and in his previous job took arguably the best European club in history, Olympique Lyonnais Feminin, to back-to-back Champions League titles.
With the Frenchman taking charge of the Atlas Lionesses and talented players such as Rosella Ayane and Yasmin Mrabet from the diaspora, Morocco entered the 2022 WAFCON with real ambitions to compete.
But despite all the preparation, infrastructure and quality recruitment, the unexpected difference maker was the thousands of fans who came to all of Morocco’s matches.
Multiple African attendance records were broken as fans turned up in droves, culminating in the final, where the official attendance was 54,000 fans at Prince Moulay Abdellah Stadium, but the actual number was much higher as fans climbed fences and barricades to enter and watch their new heroes.
Despite the defeat in the final, the success of the tournament, both on and off the pitch, has propelled Moroccan women’s football further than ever.
AS FAR Rabat continued the tournament by winning their first ever CAF Women’s Champions League. They exacted a measure of revenge by beating South African giants Mamelodi Sundowns in front of another large crowd in the same stadium where the national side lost to the South Africans.
Moroccan fans light a flare in the stands during the 2022 WAFCON final (File: Fadel Senna/AFP)
Even a short walk through a big city will show the progress of the team. Posters and billboards that were once plastered with faces like Achraf Hakimi and Hakim Ziyech now also feature stars like Ghizlane Chebbak and Fatima Tagnaout.
And the players are aware of their newfound fame, Chebbak – whose father Larbi was a former African champion in the men’s team – is mobbed after every club game with AS FAR for photos and autographs from young boys and girls.
Nouhaila Benzina has become an icon not only in Morocco but in the entire Muslim world as she will become the first player in history to wear a hijab during a World Cup.
“I don’t think there is any pressure, rather expectation and some hope,” Moroccan journalist Amine El Amri told Al Jazeera.
“People would be really happy to get through the group stage, but fans are just happy to have made it to the World Cup.”
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