Morocco’s Soccer Appeal: Why Dual-Nationals Snub European Teams for Atlas Lions

Many Belgian-Moroccan and Dutch-Moroccan players are not participating in Euro 2024 with the Belgian and Dutch national teams. The reason is that they have chosen Morocco as their sporting nationality over Belgium and the Netherlands. Among them are Couhaib Driouech, a Dutch-Moroccan star of the Moroccan under-23 team, Adnan al-Boujoufi, who played for the Netherlands under-15s, and the 13-year-old Belgian-Moroccan prodigy Ilyes Bennane, writes The New Arab. Several factors explain the interest of young Moroccans in their country of origin. "If you make the slightest little mistake here, knowing that you are of Moroccan origin, you are the victim of exaggerated criticism, unlike the Dutch who have a greater margin of error," Hakim Ziyech explained in an interview. In 2015, he preferred to join the Atlas Lions squad rather than play for the Netherlands. A similar situation in Belgium. In an interview with RTBF, the Belgian-Moroccan Khalid Zinbi, a recruiter for the Belgian youth teams, stated that players of Moroccan origin are often despised because they tend to be "smaller, thinner, more technical, they have a less imposing physique" than the coaches do not prioritize when forming a team. This is why "many players think there is a ’football xenophobia’ for this type of training - so as soon as they have a way out, the possibility of representing another country, they make that choice," he added.

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Dutch sports journalists Nordin Ghouddani and Thomas Rijsman addressed the issue in their 2020 book "Moroccan Pride," interviewing two dozen Dutch-Moroccans linked to Dutch football on their experiences. "The trend was that as a Moroccan, you were already 1-0 down, especially in the training center... you had to be three times better than your competitor, otherwise you didn’t play," Ghouddani, the Dutch-Moroccan, told local media when the book was published. "What we experience in society, Moroccans also experience in the world of football," he added, thus referring to the discrimination suffered by the Moroccan community in the Netherlands. The Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party (PVV) who had described Moroccan immigrants as "scum" and pledged to ban Muslim immigration to the Netherlands if elected, experienced a historic breakthrough in the general and European elections. In Belgium, the far-right party Vlaams Belang did not win the elections, but anti-Moroccan sentiment is very widespread in the country. In the Netherlands as in Belgium, "Moroccans have long suffered from discrimination in employment and higher rates of racial profiling and police brutality than their white counterparts - which impacts their sense of pride or belonging to these countries," analyzes Shahla Omar, former journalist and editor-in-chief of The New Arab.