Atlas Lionesses in the making: The Moroccan women battling patriarchy and restrictions to follow their football dreams

When she was five, she was the only girl in a boys’ football team. Today, she plays for a professional local women’s football team with her eyes set on representing Morocco in the next World Cup. “Things are changing,” says Khadija Fillali, a 21-year-old Moroccan footballer.

Sporting a pink kit and a high ponytail, Khadija Fillali stops for a minute to appreciate the people’s cheers before continuing to star in her team’s Hilal Temara winning game against a local team.

It was Khadija’s uncle who first noticed her talent. A football enthusiast himself, he could tell that the four-year-old kid’s dribbling and shooting skills were an early prophecy of talent. 

"I was the only girl there, but everyone seemed so supportive"

Since then, Khadija spent her mornings colouring fruits and learning the multiplication table at school and her evenings training in a small organisation brought by locals in the suburbs of Salé City, 43 kilometres far from the capital Rabat.

“I was the only girl there, but everyone seemed so supportive,” Khadija tells The New Arab. 

At 14 years old, Khadija scored a place in the capital’s junior team AS FAR. Too young to commute by herself to the other side of the Bou Regreg River, Khadija’s mother devoted her afternoons to attending her daughter’s training sessions, cheering from the sideways for a star in the making.

At the time, AS FAR Rabat was the only men’s club in Morocco that invested meaningfully in a women’s club.

“Girls’ training was scheduled for the morning and because of school, I found myself once again training with the boys in the evenings,” Khadija continues. 

The first woman footballer who bewitched Khadija was Fatima Tagnaout, Morocco’s women's national team midfielder. The two women’s paths crossed during training sessions in club AS FAR where Tagnaout, three years older than Khadija, was playing as a midfielder. 

“She is a great player. I had the chance to play with her once and her talent is immaculate,” says Khadija.

Khadija hopes for a future like Tagnaout: bearing the Moroccan flag in the next World Cup. She also hopes for a chance in joining an international team, but visa bureaucracy has made this dream impossible. “A team based in the UK was very interested in me and invited me to test there. But I couldn’t get a visa,” she told The New Arab.

When women’s football was a 'disgrace’

A few kilometres away from Khadija’s training centre and two generations ago, Fatima, a Moroccan 54-year-old housewife, was born with similar dreams.

In 1976, seven-year-old at the time, Fatima was dumbfounded by the Moroccan men’s football team’s historical victory in the Africa Cup — the first and only AFCON championship Morocco won until the day.

“I used to sneak with my brother’s ball and go to a neighbourhood next to us to play with the boys. They had no choice but to let me play"

Too young to grasp the concept of gender and patriarchal stereotypes, Fatima spent her days and nights dreaming of a fate alike.

Since unknown times, Moroccan neighbourhoods’ football rules stated that whoever owns the ball can dictate the game and choose the players. “I used to sneak with my brother’s ball and go to a neighbourhood next to us to play with the boys. They had no choice but to let me play,” explains Fatima giggling.

Though her football dreams were soon crushed when an angry neighbour, disturbed during his siesta by the children’s game, deflated Fatima’s ball and took her to her family house to complain about her “shameful” behaviour, she recalls.

“In my time, it would take a man to believe in you to pursue football. In my family they never did"

“It was considered Hchouma (disgraceful) to play with boys then,” Fatima recalls keeping a wide smile, “I was of course punished and grounded for months and didn’t touch a ball for years after that incident,” she added.

Fatima says she never knew if she really had the talent, but she was robbed of the opportunity to figure that out herself. 

“In my time, it would take a man to believe in you to pursue football. In my family they never did,” Fatima, told The New Arab.

Today a mother of two boys, who cares so little for a football career, Fatima follows obsessively the Women’s World Cup, cheering not only for the Atlas Lionesses, she says but “for all the girls from countries where women's football dreams were sabotaged by (...) men."

Moroccan women's football has come a long way

It actually took a man to believe in women’s football potential in Morocco to start its transformation journey. But without decades of lobbying and work from women athletes, Fouzi Lekjaa would probably never have noticed.

In 2014, Lekjaa, a new president of the Royal Moroccan Football Federation (FRMF), was appointed with the government’s backing to transform football in the North African kingdom.

He spent his first three years in office working mainly on the men’s side. It was until 2017 that he finally listened to the women in the federation pressuring for more funds for the women’s side of football.

In 2019, the federation launched a fully professional national football league and regional second tier for 42 clubs across the country, making Morocco the first country in the world to have two tiers of professional women’s football.

A year later, The FRMF appointed French international Reynald Pedros, an arguably elite coach in women’s football, as head coach of the Lionesses. 

Two players, Rosella Ayane and Yasmin Mrabet, were brought in from the diaspora to boost the Lionesses’ performance.

Last year, the Lionesses played their first WAFCON finale in a packed stadium in Rabat with the audience chanting for the first time Chebbak and Taghnaout names instead of Hakimi and Ziyach.

And despite their loss, Moroccans celebrated all night the lionesses’ singing “Hadi Lbidaya w Mazal, Mazal, (This is only the start, and there's more.”)

Walid Reguragui, Moroccan men’s football team coach, coach of Casablanca’s Wydad club at the time, announced to the journalists in his broken Darija dialect after a winning match, “The boys were not men today they were women, like the women who played the WAFCON finale. (...) They played a great match. ”

Today, in Morocco, women playing football is no longer “Hchouma”, it is instead a synonym for hard work, resilience and well-deserved success. And the credit goes to all the Lionesses who dreamed and fought along the way.

Basma El Atti is The New Arab’s Morocco correspondent, covering local affairs and social and cultural events in the Maghreb region. She began her career as a journalist in a Moroccan anglophone outlet, before joining the New Arab in 2022

Follow her on Twitter: @elattibasma