For last week’s issue of the school paper I decided to tackle (ha) sports culture in Morocco. My conclusion: football is at the center of the universe here. The other night, in a heated match against FC Barcelona and Real Madrid I can proudly say that I stand by my writings. The game started at 8:30 Moroccan time–well before 7:30 all the cafes in my hood were filled with men, and I mean stock-full! It took 20-30 minutes of walking for me and my friends to find a seat in a cafe with a good TV. By the time the game started, the amount of people had more than doubled. Last night’s game happened to be super suspenseful and I sure can stand by the idea that we’re more likely to see a riot erupt from football than politics and civil unrest in Morocco. Every time something happened men were yelling violently, and sometimes this happened when nothing major was going on in the game…
Unfortunately Barca was defeated (don’t worry, two more games against Madrid in the next two weeks!) and the Real fan base made this clear! After the game ended the street was full of male Moroccan youth just swarming the street, yelling, and arguing… There was a fight in my street that involved knives and rocks, but thankfully it got broken up before anything too serious could happen!
So here’s the column:
Protests in Morocco have continued to remain peaceful and reports have said that the country is going through a “quiet reform.” In response to the February 20 Movement for Change, King Mohammed VI has created a panel to propose adjustments to the Moroccan constitution. In addition, the King has announced in a televised speech that he is willing to surrender some of his powers, such as the ability to appoint the prime minister and dissolve the parliament.
While politics and reform are something that Moroccans have demonstrated a peaceful and tranquil approach to, football (aka soccer) is something that really gets everybody’s blood pumping and boiling here. Not necessarily to the point of violence, but as a friend rather aptly joked, we’re more likely to see a riot erupt in Morocco resulting from football than from politics. The big question here is not “Where were you during the February 20 Movement for Change?” or “Where were you when the news of Egypt’s revolution broke out?” as one might expect, but rather “Where were you watching the final match of the World Cup last summer?”
Football overwhelmingly dominates the sports culture in Morocco. Moroccans are especially serious about the Spanish league. Every Moroccan friend I have has declared allegiance to either FC Barcelona or Real Madrid. Additionally, all my Moroccan friends play football and have been playing from a young age. While they may not play professionally, they sure do enjoy the recreation. Don’t you dare come between them and play time.
I cannot even begin to count the number of Messi or Ronaldo jerseys I’ve seen for sale in medinas across the country, and especially on the backs of young Moroccan boys.
The window of my apartment overlooks several cafés, one of them called L’Équipe (the team). On football game nights, whether Champion’s League, Spanish League or Moroccan League, you can depend on a full house, with all the men sitting on the patio, tightly packed around the TV, coffee and other refreshments in hand. Football is such a social experience here. Whether uniting or dividing friends with loyalties to Madrid or Barca, it brings everyone together to see who will conquer and who will admit defeat. While it is not so different from Americans huddling together to watch the Super Bowl, March Madness or the World Series, the two biggest cultural differences that I’ve observed is that practically all sports fans are football fans and that secondly, these sports fans are predominately male (way more so than in the States).
In the States, our sports interests are divided. Not EVERY American will choose between the Yankees and the Red Sox, the Colts and the Patriots, the Lakers and the Celtics, etc. In the States we’ve got a venn diagram of sports in our landscape, overlapping football (American), baseball, basketball and hockey—sports pluralism. Most people cannot agree on one dominant or favorite sport in the States, but it seems pretty clear-cut that football rules the sports scene here in an authoritarian manner. While there are other popular sports such as basketball and tennis, no other sport really has the same pulling power that football has. This football frenzy is not unique to Morocco; from my travels across Europe this past year I’ve seen that most countries outside of the States sure do love their football.
Football is chiefly a man’s world here. I’ll occasionally be able to find other females watching the matches at cafés, but they are usually fellow foreigners such as myself or girlfriends trying to spend time with their boyfriends who seemed to have dragged them there—reminding me of how I saw American women dragging their boyfriends with them to the premiere of “Sex and the City 2.”
Why is there such a big gender divide when it comes to football in Morocco? I’m not totally sure, but I can say that it is something that is not a recent practice. From a young age Moroccan boys play on a team and take an interest in sports news, but I cannot say that I’ve observed the same thing in girls. Even though my tomboy host sister has not expressed a great interest in football she’s a huge sports fan: her preferred sports are kayaking and kung fu.
Whatever the reasons for this cultural phenomenon, it is fair to say that football has the ability to bring all sorts of men together here and it is a beautiful thing to see so many Moroccans so passionate about something on game nights. As a foreign girl living over here in football-land I have been able to somewhat infiltrate this guy’s club and have taken a great liking to watching the Spanish league (hail to the Messi! Go Barcelona!), but I have also gotten used to often being the only girl at the café. This is no big deal because everyone is too absorbed in the game to pay me any attention or bother me.
Julianne Cut 