The Moroccan selection announced its squad for the World Cup in Qatar on Thursday and one absence has attracted attention: that of striker Munir El Hadadi, who plays for Getafe in the Spanish league.
Munir’s form is not the best of the season: he has scored just one goal in eight games. But the absence of the Spanish-born player had repercussions for another reason too: the efforts of the Moroccan Football Federation to ensure that he could defend the country. A dispute that lasted three years and which made Fifa change a rule for national football.
The story begins in 2014. Munir made his professional debut at Barcelona, after excelling in the Catalan club’s B team. Son of a Moroccan father and a Spanish mother, he could have chosen both teams. But, in September of the same year, he was called up by the Spanish Under 21 team. During the camp, senior forward Diego Costa was injured and Vicente del Bosque ‘borrowed’ Munir from the under-21 team.
It turns out that, in the next match, a duel against Macedonia, for Euro Cup qualifying, Del Bosque put Munir in the 32nd minute of the second half. The Spanish national team’s 13 minutes on the field, in an official match, bind the forward to the European squad forever, according to the rules in force at the time.
Over the next few years, Munir went from being a Barcelona revelation to a little-used player at the Catalan club, which was experiencing the heyday of the Messi-Neymar-Suárez trio. Without space, he was loaned out to Valencia and Alavés, and never shone again, being far from a new call-up in Spain.
In Morocco, however, Munir’s name was considered an important part of the national team. Only those 13 minutes played by Spain prevented the call-up. The Moroccan Football Federation made a request to FIFA in 2017 to have Munir in the 2018 World Cup.
The battle continued for years to come. In 2020 Morocco insisted again and even summoned Munir, but the request was again rejected. In 2021, given the insistence of the Moroccans and the appearance of other similar cases, Fifa modified the eligibility rule for national teams, creating, among other things, a limit of three matches, to make any changes more flexible. At the time, the change was called the “Munir amendment”.
Since March 2021, the Spanish-Moroccan striker has played 11 games and scored two goals. He was a given in the final list of 26 players, but manager Walid Regragui has opted for other names, including two with very little international experience: Abde Ezzalzouli, a former Barcelona player and currently at Osasuna, and Walid Cheddira, born in Italy, defending Bari.
