Moroccan Star Amine Harit Opens Up About Childhood in Tough Neighborhood

20 February 2019 – byAmine · 3 min read

For the Atlas Lion Amine Harit, 21, his team is first and foremost his family: His father, mother, sister and brother. He would have started football to assert himself in his neighborhood, a neighborhood in Pontoise, which he describes as dangerous. He confided in theplayerstribune.com, going back to his origins as a footballer, to his own origins in fact, to what he is.

It is a rather moving story told by Amine Harit that the site theplayerstribune has just published. The footballer looks back on his childhood, in his neighborhood of Pontoise, which was not very safe at the time. Thus, in the early 2000s, Harit reveals: "My parents didn’t want my brother and I to play too far from home. As soon as we moved away, my mother would come out and yell: Amine, do you see that sidewalk? well you stay on this side!" This says a lot about the feeling of insecurity prevailing. That’s why the family is important: "My father, my mother, my brother and my sister and I all lived together in a small house. They were my team, my everything. In Pontoise, you need your team. Because in the early 2000s, it wasn’t the safest city".

But Amine Harit began to defy his mother. First by asking her not to pick him up from school anymore, then by going straight to the football field when he got out of school, and this, since he was fourteen years old. His mother, who was always scolding him, was starting to understand little by little. "Surviving" didn’t interest him. What he wanted was to live. He was therefore creating his place in the neighborhood. To prove that he could "handle it".

As for the choice of the national team, it would have been almost automatic, according to Harit: "I’ve heard people say I chose Morocco because it was easier. How to say... I love France, but Morocco... the Moroccans, they’re my people too. I feel this connection to the country that I can’t explain. France has given me so much, but my family is everything to me. And they are Moroccan. My grandparents, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins - many still live in Morocco. So when I had to choose who I wanted to play for, I felt indebted to these people".

Moreover, he does not regret it. He who is not easily moved would -and he reveals it himself- have cried during Morocco’s victory over Côte d’Ivoire, thus leading the Kingdom to its qualification for the World Cup. Harit describes the aftermath: "and on our return to Morocco, the support we had on our arrival was so incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. I want it again. I want it a million times".

His dream now would be to start a family and have children. Which we wish him...