Morocco, Spain, and Portugal Unite in Bid for 2030 World Cup, Boosting Diplomatic Ties

Morocco’s candidacy to host the 2030 World Cup, alongside Spain and Portugal, was officially announced on Tuesday in Kigali, Rwanda. After the historic performance of its team at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, where it reached the semi-finals after eliminating Spain in the round of 16 and Portugal in the quarter-finals, Morocco dreams of hosting the World Cup for the first time, jointly with these two countries.

The possibility of a tripartite candidacy had been mentioned by President Pedro Sanchez during his first visit to Morocco in November 2018. But the proposal had met with the refusal of FIFA, which did not endorse a collaboration between federations from different continents to organize a World Cup. Today, this constraint has been lifted and Morocco has been able to associate with Spain and Portugal’s bid to host the 2030 World Cup. This tripartite candidacy will have to compete with the tricontinental candidacy composed of Greece, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as well as with the one composed of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Chile, reports El País.

FIFA will decide at its congress scheduled for the summer of 2024, but the three countries (Morocco, Spain and Portugal) are already working to build their candidacy file. According to diplomatic sources, this is the first time that Rabat and Madrid are working on an exciting medium-term project, stressing that the success of this project could change the climate of relations between the two countries, from mistrust to cooperation. The same sources say that this project would have been unthinkable without Spain’s change of position on the Sahara, which led to the normalization of its relations with Morocco after more than a year of diplomatic crisis.

But this resumption of relations has not yet produced the expected results, as the opening of commercial customs in Ceuta and Melilla is not always effective, despite the holding in early February of the high-level meeting that addressed the issue. However, cooperation has been strengthened in the migratory and commercial fields. Furthermore, Spain’s change of position on the Sahara has opened a crisis with Algeria, which has suspended its treaty of friendship, cooperation and good neighborliness with Spain, thus blocking trade exchanges with the country, with the exception of gas.