‘Expectation had to be raised’: the making of World Cup heroes Morocco

For Osian Roberts it was too good an offer to turn down. When the coach once described as the most influential man in Welsh football was invited to Rabat in the summer of 2019 to meet Fouzi Lekjaa, the president of the Royal Moroccan Football Federation, he was whisked off on a tour of the Complexe Mohammed VI Maamoura – the state-of-the-art national training centre that would officially open a few months later.

Roberts swiftly signed up as the federation’s technical director and the two years he spent in the job mean he is looking on from afar at the team’s remarkable World Cup achievements with particular excitement and satisfaction.

“I was absolutely convinced and wanted to be fully onboard because of the passion he [Lekjaa] has for football in Morocco – that’s what sold it to me,” says Roberts, now assistant manager at Crystal Palace. “It wasn’t just a wish or a dream. There was a plan behind it in order to achieve success. For me it was just a wonderful opportunity to develop football further in Morocco and become one of the leading nations in Africa that everybody could aspire to work towards. It almost felt like an obligation for me to jump on the bus and drive it forward.”

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The Atlas Lions will make history on Wednesday when they become the first African team to contest a World Cup semi-final. Led by the Paris-born manager Walid Regragui, a side made up of homegrown stars including the dashing midfielder Azzedine Ounahi and barnstorming striker Youssef En-Nesyri, and players drawn from the country’s wide diaspora, such as Hakim Ziyech and Achraf Hakimi, face the world champions, France. According to Roberts, their success is no accident.

“Morocco is very serious about its football and the level of investment over the last 10 years has been quite astounding,” he says. “Some of these players at the World Cup have graduated from the Mohamed VI youth academy but since then the national training centre has been built and was inaugurated by the king while I was there. It’s an unbelievable facility that is as good as anything in the world. At the same time they have opened five regional centres for the best boys and girls in the country.”

Related: Morocco football fans: share your expectations before the World Cup semi-final against France

En-Nesyri – who scored the winning goal against Portugal in the quarter-finals – was the original poster boy for the academy named after the football-mad reigning monarch that opened in 2009 and has produced Ounahi, the defender Nayaf Aguerd of West Ham and the third-choice goalkeeper Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti. Competition for places is fierce, with the academy’s sides playing matches in Morocco’s amateur leagues and in youth tournaments around Europe. There are close links with clubs in Spain and France, such as Málaga – where Sevilla’s En-Nesyri began his career in Europe – and Ouhani’s Angers.

“They have made it easier for players to find a pathway to Europe – some have succeeded and some have not,” says Abdellah Aarab, who owns the Moroccan football website almarssadpro.com. “For many years we used to see our best players go to the Gulf leagues for the money rather than try to develop their careers at smaller European clubs first.”

Roberts believes vast improvements in the standard of coaching in Morocco have made an important difference, particularly for Regragui, who won the domestic title with FUS and Wydad Casablanca. “There was a tendency for most opportunities to go to more experienced coaches but now to see him as a young coach coming through and succeeding at this level is so important,” Roberts says.

The former Morocco defender was, with Senegal’s Aliou Cissé, part of the first pro-licence run by the Confederation of African Football and graduated in June, two months before he replaced Vahid Halilhodzic. “The course had started before I arrived but I continued that course and it actually finished after I left for Palace,” Roberts says. “During my time there we had Roberto Martínez, Patrick Vieira and Thierry Henry deliver modules for the students, and of course Regragui was one of them.”

Morocco’s group-stage victory over Belgium was therefore even more embarrassing for Martínez but he is not the only manager outwitted by Regragui at this World Cup. The cosmopolitan Regragui has united a squad that speaks several languages including Darija (the Moroccan dialect of Arabic), French, Spanish and even English. “There are a few players in the squad who are Berbers or Amazigh that grew up in the Netherlands and they speak Berber more at home with their parents,” Aarab says. “With them he is communicating more in English.”

Fourteen players in Morocco’s squad were born overseas. Most were identified by the extensive scouting system established by Lekjaa and Roberts’s predecessor as technical director, Nasser Larguet.

“We had full-time scouts in Holland, Germany, France, Spain and Scandinavia that are monitoring these players on a regular basis,” says Roberts. “There was a database for all of those who were eligible for Morocco in all those countries ... it was necessary given the amount of players living overseas. That department has been extremely important.”

Three France youth internationals – Amine Adli of Bayer Leverkusen, Nice’s Sofiane Diop and Mohamed-Ali Cho, a Real Sociedad striker once on Everton’s books – are thought to be next on the federation’s radar. “When you bring young players to the country and you want to convince them to play for Morocco then it really helps to see such a professional training base like you see in western Europe or Qatar,” says the Moroccan pundit Jalal Bounouar.

Roberts said Morocco should aim to be in the world’s top 20 when he stepped down in June 2021, and it is not only the senior men’s side who have exceeded expectations. The women’s team lost to South Africa in the Africa Cup of Nations final on home soil in July and the men’s futsal team are reigning Arab and African champions and reached the world championships quarter-finals last year.

“I just felt the level of expectation needed to be raised because of the infrastructure and the talent that exists in the country,” says Roberts, who spent almost 10 years at the Football Association of Wales and was Chris Coleman’s assistant for the run to the Euro 2016 semi-finals. “Having worked with Wales for such a long time, we went from 117th in the world to eighth and then managed to sustain it with good planning and a vision of where we wanted to go. Likewise for Morocco now – this can’t be a one-off.”

Royal Air Maroc is operating 30 special flights for supporters to join the estimated 40,000 already in Qatar. Roberts will watch at home and says Vieira – the former France midfielder who is now his boss at Palace – is concerned about facing Regragui’s side. “He’s not so confident about this game as he has been. He knows: he’s been in that situation where they have found it difficult in those games. Patrick always said when he played for France they always found it difficult playing against African teams. They knew they would raise the level against them and were so motivated and you could see it in their faces. That might prove to be the case again.”