The globalized football of Morocco by mystic Walid Regragui

At the top of the peninsula of Ras Tleta Madari (or Cabo de Tres Forcas) – the strip of land that stretches into the Mediterranean north of Melilla – the mystic Ali al-Jamal taught his followers that only by studying and learning of Western knowledge and technology, his, their lands – the Moroccan emirate of the Alawidi dynasty, i.e. a large part of Morocco, and a part of Western Sahara – could have achieved prosperity and all creation achieved lasting peace . The mystic Ali al-Jamal said that the greatness of men lay in learning different and distant customs and knowledge to arrive at an ultra-knowledge, a complete and all-encompassing wisdom, which would have allowed Morocco to rise to power and then to merge with all the others in a new global dimension.

The teaching of the mystic Ali al-Jamal ended badly, forgotten and replaced by that of his disciple Muhammad al-Arabi al-Darqawi: his teachings were too weird, dangerous both for the emirate and for Islamic orthodoxy.

Ali al-Jamal’s teaching reached the ears of Franco Battiato and traveled a lot between the 1970s and 1980s in the more hipster Islamic communities of Paris and its surroundings. He ended badly even then for the mystic’s teaching.

However, something has remained of his lesson, even if crippled and out of context, perhaps unconsciously and completely by chance, in Walid Regragui. The coach of Morocco is a strange and very successful mix of Moroccan and European culture. A cultured person, with gentle but decisive manners, the very rare ability to make himself understood thanks to a glance, a nod. He was also like this as a footballer: defender, discovered by Rudi Garcia at Corbeil-Essonnes, when he played in the youth team. For his ability to read the action, for his ability to understand what was going to happen, for football intelligence “he could have become one of the strongest defenders in the world”, said his former coach at the time of Ajaccio Rolland Courbis, one of the technicians-gurus of French football, as enlightened and avant-garde as he is incapable of mediation and wavering in character. Then he added: “His problem wasn’t his head, amazing, it was his feet, and feet can’t be educated that much”.

Courbis brought with him the conviction that there had been nothing better in the history of football than Danubian football, the way of playing of the Austrians and Hungarians between the end of the 1920s and the first half of the 1950s. His football was grafted onto the tradition started by the Wunderteam and merged, through various evolutions, into Aranycsapat, the Greater Hungary of Hidegkuti, Puskas and Kocsis. He never managed to really re-propose that idea of ​​football, but he still thrilled fans and players.

Walid Regragui absorbed the Courbis method for two years. A method left to decant for decades, then taken up and put into practice in a national team that shouldn’t have been his, but which was his until the end, from 31 August 2022. A football that is pure globalization, which starts from European teaching , from the Italian attention to defensive management, from the French obsession – moreover recent – for the game on the flanks; embrace the athleticism and exuberance of African football; however in a post-Danubian tactical framework, based on a three-and-a-half defense (the full-backs play very tall and only one really defends), where, however, the fake striker, Hidegkuti, is not at the center of the game system – i.e. the central attacker who lowers himself to create the offensive game, in practice an attacking midfielder ante litteram – but the two central midfielders, called to be the link between the attack and the defence, but above all between one wing and the other. A change of conception of the field, a reversal of perspective like that of Ali al-Jamal. The field is no longer vertical; we are no longer classified by defenders, midfielders or forwards, but we think horizontally: the team must be balanced between flanks and centre, the players must maintain a balance from right to left. So far it has gone well, very well. However, the mystic Regragui will have to deal with the sultan Luis Enrique.