Moroccan-Spanish Coach Highlights Progress and Challenges in Moroccan Football

With a dozen experiences as a coach of several Moroccan clubs, Benali acknowledges that Moroccan football has evolved a lot, "especially in the last six or seven years." "There is the VAR, all the pitches are now in natural grass, the federation invests a lot in the academies and it has transformed all the entities into public limited companies to try to make them more competitive," he told El País.

On the other hand, what has not changed, according to Benali, are the internal criticisms. "You go to the stadium of Raja or Wydad, apart from the main stand, people don’t pay attention to the game. These are fans who jump and sing, and then they hit you. The coaches don’t last long. I took Ittihad Tanger twice, I saved them and they told me they wanted to bring in a more well-known coach. Now they are at the bottom, and since July, three others have left," laments the coach, who also recalls the great debate on nationality as a criterion for entry into the national team.

"Four years ago, players who were not born in Morocco or trained in Europe were not considered Moroccan. Important actors in the sector only wanted local league players. Hervé Renard and Vahid Halilhodzic [the coaches before Walid Regragui] had a lot of problems with that. As soon as they lost a match, they called on the local players. Even Walid Regragui, after the semi-final at the World Cup, was criticized for changing the game system against France," confides Juan Pedro Benali.

But in the analysis, the keys to Morocco’s success at the World Cup in Qatar lie in its dual nationals. Of the 26