Why Today? · How did France end up playing against itself?

Morocco named its 2026 World Cup squad in May. Twenty-six players. Seven were born in Morocco. Nineteen were born elsewhere — six in France, six in Spain, three in the Netherlands, three in Belgium, one in Canada. In the tournament's opening match against Canada, Morocco started its first all-foreign-born lineup in national team history.

This is not an accident or an anomaly. It is the shape that forty-four years of history leaves on a roster.

On March 30, 1912, the Sultan of Morocco signed the Treaty of Fez. Under military pressure, he ceded foreign policy, military command, and most of the economy to France. The document called this arrangement a "protectorate" — a word that distinguished it, in theory, from colonization. In practice, France controlled Morocco for the next forty-four years. It built roads, schools, and cities for French settlers. It suppressed uprisings, including a 1912 revolt that killed 800 Moroccan soldiers in a single crackdown. When independence finally came in 1956, France had remade the country's infrastructure, language, and labor market in its own image.

What followed was migration. Moroccan workers — cheap labor for France's postwar reconstruction boom — came to Lyon, Marseille, Paris. Their children were born French. Those children's children are now 26 and playing in a World Cup.

FIFA's eligibility rules allow a player to represent the country of their birth, their parents, or their grandparents, provided they can demonstrate nationality. In 2021, FIFA went further: players who had appeared in up to three youth matches for one country could switch allegiances once. Several members of Morocco's 2026 squad had represented France at youth level before making that switch. FIFA, a bureaucracy not known for philosophy, has quietly built the sport's most practical answer to the question of what nationality actually means: it means something you can choose, once, when you're ready.

In December 2022, Morocco beat Spain and Portugal to reach the World Cup semifinal for the first time in any African or Arab nation's history. When the final whistle went, Moroccan flags appeared in the streets of Paris — not in opposition to France, but as French citizens celebrating Morocco. France deployed 10,000 police across the country that evening. In Montpellier, a man was killed in a hit-and-run after the celebrations. A group of forty far-right activists, armed with prohibited weapons, was arrested before it could reach the Champs-Élysées.

"I was born in France, but nobody can have my heart for my country."
— Walid Regragui, Morocco's head coach 2022–2026, after the 2022 quarterfinal win over Spain. Regragui was born in Corbeil-Essonnes, a suburb south of Paris.

Regragui replaced the previous Morocco coach six weeks before the 2022 tournament began. The players — many of them European-born — had lost confidence in their predecessor and told the federation. They wanted someone who understood where they came from. The federation hired a man born in Paris, raised between two countries, who had decided which one he was for. In March 2026, three months before this tournament, Regragui resigned. He is not in the dugout on Thursday. The team he built is.