After the game, I always go to visit my mother. She goes directly into the crowd, hugs her, and even hands her the uniform she’s wearing. her mom kisses her son It was the same when we beat Belgium in the group stage, knocked down Spain in the round of 16, and beat Portugal in the quarterfinals. For Moroccan defender Hakimi (24), it is a ‘mom’s World Cup’.
Hakimi was born in Madrid, Spain. Her parents, who immigrated from Morocco, were poor. To make ends meet, her father sold goods on the street and her mother took a cleaning job. Her son, who loved her football, was picked up by the Real Madrid youth team in 2006. His father drove his son 100 km to and from the training ground every day, waiting for his son outside the training ground for hours. Hakimi responded. She achieved her dream and her success followed. She went through Real Madrid and proved her worth at Dortmund, Inter Milan and Paris Saint-Germain. She eventually made it to the World Cup and was with the Moroccan football miracle.
Hakimi is not the only thing unique in Morocco. Fourteen of the 26 were born outside Morocco to immigrant families. They range from as far away as Canada to as close as Spain, France, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands. The ‘diaspora’, a people who leave 안전놀이터 the mainland and live in a foreign country while maintaining their own norms and customs, is also possible in soccer. The struggles of the parents’ generation, who tried not to forget their Moroccan identity amidst the exhausting life away from home, shone through their children on the World Cup stage. It cannot be simply concluded that it is a combination of soccer and nationalism or nationalism. The sorrowful lives of Moroccan immigrants, who had to live as marginalized people in European history, and the attachment to their families that allowed them to endure their hard lives showed their strength.
The World Cup opponent’s reminder of the historical bad luck also affected Morocco’s ‘team spirit’. The surprise of beating Belgium was the start. 100 years ago, Moroccans immigrated en masse to Belgium to replace mine labor, and this time they paid back the cold treatment and discrimination they suffered for a long time with soccer. In the round of 16, they beat Spain, who once dominated Morocco and still refuses to give back some territory. The quarterfinals were also Portugal, which had a history of tension and conflict for hundreds of years. Again, the fourth power is France, which colonized Morocco. History has moved to the World Cup.
So, it is not easy to sum up Morocco’s World Cup journey in one word, a miracle. Africa’s first four rivers cannot be evaluated only with monuments. It’s because that ‘something’ beyond football is melted in it.