When the strongest player in the world played for Morocco (but chose France)

That day, that June 12, 1938, a good part, perhaps the majority, of those who stood in the stands of the Stade municipal Paul-Pantaloni in Annaba, Algeria, began to lose interest in the match. His eyes no longer followed the ball, but focused on one man only. The rest had become superfluous, even football support. And yes, that match was not second-rate, but the final of the Championnat d’Afrique du Nord (a sort of Champions League ante litteram between the championships of the French Protectorate of Morocco, that of Tunisia, the Department of Algiers, that of Oran , that of Constantine) between the JBAC Bône of Annaba and the US Marocaine of Casablanca. “The gazes followed the Moroccan number ten (US Marocaine, ed), fascinated, incredulous that so much grace could be contained in a man so tall and so big, but who ran with the lightness of a dancer. Dear Louis, even then I was aware that I would never see such a strong footballer again”. It was 1954 when Albert Camus wrote this to his architect friend Louis-Charles-Victor Miquel. The writer was in Marseilles, the previous day at the Vélodrome stadium he had seen the player he had fallen in love with as a young man playing for Olympique Marseille: Larbi Ben Barekthe Black Pearl.

Because before the Brazilian Pérola Negra, Pelé, and the Portuguese, Eusebio, there was the Perle noire, the man who “if I am the King of football, Ben Barek is the God”, said O’Rey in 1976. Because Larbi Ben Barek had been a “sublime footballer”, Gabriel Hanot wrote of him (the father of the Ballon d’Or) on the Miroir des Sports. He argued: “He’s a midfielder who defends like a centre-half, he has the snap of the wing, the shooting and the starting point of the centre-attack, the strength of a full-back. I thought it was impossible to find football perfection in one player. He is very gratifying, watching Larbi Benbarek play (in France the surname was all attached, ed), realizing he was wrong ”.

Larbi Ben Barek was born in Tata in an oasis three hundred kilometers south-east of Agadir, Morocco, he had found himself starving in Casablanca and starved to start playing football. Meanwhile he was a carpenter. It was working with wood that he learned geometry. He applied it to football. Mario Zatelli, his teammate at US Marocaine (later coach of the first great OM, the one who won the two championships in the early 1970s) said that “Larbi reasoned in triangles. When he didn’t see his teammates becoming the vertices of a triangle then he acted like him: a feint, a dribble and lots of greetings to the opponents. He had an elegant and very effective dribbling ”.

Larbi Ben Barek scored a lot, but less than he could have, because the Black Pearl didn’t live for the goal, but for the last pass, the decisive one. At the Stade Français, the Paris team, the president in fact gave cash prizes for those who made the assist, convinced that financially rewarding those who score would have created problems for team play. In 103 matches he scored 56 goals and offered 78 decisive passes. One of his coaches, a certain Helenio Herrera, said of him: “Benbarek was the class. I’ve never coached anyone as talented as he is. Only Suárez (Luisito, ed) was superior to him in terms of game vision, for the rest there was no comparison”.

He didn’t lose his assisting habit even in the five seasons he played with Atletico Madrid between 1948 and 1953. Even there, the president granted a prize for every assist. And there was only one thing Larbi Ben Barek liked more than football: money. For money, not for glory, he said goodbye to US Marocaine in 1938, for money he returned in 1939: there was war in Europe, OM didn’t pay and he had no desire to fight. For money between 1941 and 1943 he divided his time between grass and parquet (actually concrete) and in addition to football he played basketball at Wydad AC. And for money he preferred the French national team to that of Morocco. Who knows who he would have cheered for today in the semi-final of the 2022 World Cup. “I’m a footballer, the French pay me more. Why should I play for free? There are few great footballers, even less than great doctors. If a famous professor gets paid so much why shouldn’t a footballer get more?”.