“Another season that is halted and never finished will create more chaos and disputes on the organizational side, while on the professional side we have a generation of young players who are simply getting lost.”

The Middle East is not calm, and the winds of war blowing through it are leaving their mark on regional football too. The Asian Cup, which was due to kick off in Saudi Arabia in January 2027, has been postponed to December of that year, mainly because of the tension between the Saudis and the Houthis. As reported by BabaGol, the prospect of another round of fighting between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran on the other added no certainty either, and the tournament’s organizers decided not to take a risk.

Such a war, as Saman says, would have severe consequences for Iranian football, which is already struggling today, seven months after the previous round of fighting ended.

A small example surfaced last week, when Iran’s Tractor Sazi were on the verge of withdrawing from the AFC Champions League. The incident came after the United Arab Emirates refused to allow the Iranian team’s plane to land in Al Ain ahead of its Champions League match. The ban on landings by Iranian carriers is part of the sanctions imposed on Iranian airlines in the UAE, as part of the Emiratis aligning themselves with the updated US sanctions on Tehran.

Tractor, like every Iranian team since the war last March, does not host matches on Iranian soil. For the match in which they “hosted” Qatar’s Al-Shamal in Muscat, the capital of Oman, they had to make a twenty-hour journey from Tabriz to Tehran, from there to Najaf in Iraq and then Baghdad, and only then fly to Oman.

In the end, the Emirati federation decided to make a goodwill gesture and allowed Tractor Sazi to land in Dubai on a plane belonging to the Iranian airline Meraj, so they could reach the match against Al Ain, which ended in a 2-1 win for the UAE champions.

This small incident may be only a small swallow of what is approaching.

On the eve of the elections in Israel at the end of October, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there was a chance of opening another campaign against Iran. According to reports, US President Donald Trump, who was himself focused on the midterm elections for the House and the Senate, was kept informed and was interested in the move.

The legitimacy of such an attack at such a time, certainly given the political climate in Israel and the United States, is open to debate. It may be that talk of it is only a tool for negotiating a new nuclear deal, or that it serves only the domestic interests of Netanyahu, Trump and the Revolutionary Guards, or that it really is preparation for another round of missiles, sirens and damage in Israel, Iran and the Middle East.

On the eve of another war, a deeper look at what has been happening in Iranian football in recent months helps us better understand Saman’s remark at the start of this text.

Similarities to Israel

The war with Iran affected every area of life in Israel, including football. It ranged from Israeli clubs and national teams not hosting international matches at home, to deals with foreign players that fell through because they preferred not to come, to the crowded schedule at the end of last season, caused by the need to complete matches from the war period and finish the season on time given the proximity of the World Cup.

In Iranian football the situation has been even more severe since the war. Last season’s league and cup ended without a champion or a cup winner being determined, and the federation chose, arbitrarily, the representatives who would play in the Asian competitions according to the teams’ league positions on the eve of the war.

Because of the break in league activity, the top division, the Persian Gulf Pro League, was expanded from 16 to 18 teams, with three promoted from the second division and only one team relegated, before the break.

Although Iranian league rules allow clubs to register eight foreign players in a squad, before the war there were close to 60 foreign players in the Iranian league, almost three per team on average. The reason is the value-added tax imposed on clubs from the third foreign player onward. Today, because of the war and safety concerns, only 19 foreigners remain in the whole league, five of them from Uzbekistan in Central Asia.

Iranian teams are hosting in Oman, in Tajikistan, and even in Iraq. Who would have believed that the security situation in Iran would be so fragile that Iranian teams would have to host in a place as safe as Iraq, a country that, until just a few years ago, had gone decades without hosting international sporting events.

That is not the only effect the war has had on Iranian football. One of the prominent stories on the eve of the war and in its first days was the saga of the women’s national team at the Women’s Asian Cup in Australia. During the tournament seven Iranian players fled the Iranian camp and asked for asylum in Australia. The story made global headlines, with Donald Trump himself getting involved on the players’ behalf and demanding that Australia grant them asylum.

Despite the fine gesture, in the end only two players, Fatemeh Pasandideh and Atefeh Ramezanizadeh, stayed in Australia and were partly absorbed into the local Brisbane Roar team, while five players changed their minds and returned home with the team after, according to reports, their families in Iran received threats. Zahra Ghanbari, the team’s captain, who was one of the players who defected and then returned, discovered on her return that her private property had been confiscated by the Revolutionary Guards.

Another saga that drew international attention and a response from the US president himself was the participation of Iran’s men’s national team in the World Cup in the United States. Iran’s whole participation took on a symbolic dimension because of the war, and together with the fact that its matches were scheduled on US soil, this led to great political pressure beginning to take effect. First, the team’s camp was moved from Arizona to Mexico. Then the length of stay allowed to the Iranian team on US soil before and after the matches was restricted, and the matches themselves became a meeting point between Iranians opposed to the regime and those who support the Revolutionary Guards. “Despite the difficult conditions at the tournament, fans expected the team to at least reach the round of 32,” an Iranian football journalist living in exile, who asked to remain anonymous, explains to BabaGol. “The disappointment that coach Amir Ghalenoei remains in his job is enormous, and most of the public demands that the federation appoint a foreign coach who will lead the team and be detached from the politics among federation officials, club heads and players.” Sound familiar?

Today the national team is based mainly on players in the domestic league, and if the war returns, Iranian football, like all football in West Asia, will be in deep trouble. The Asian Cup in Saudi Arabia has already been postponed, and for the Persian Gulf Pro League, another round and another cancelled season would be “a heavy blow in both the short and long term,” the exiled journalist explains. “In the previous round many plants in vital and heavy industries were hit, including some that own league clubs, such as Sepahan of the city of Isfahan, which is owned by the Mobarakeh Steel company, and Foolad Khuzestan, owned by Khuzestan Steel. Those hits led to economic problems, and both teams failed to obtain an AFC license to take part in the Asian competitions. The damage to this infrastructure directly harms football activity in the country, and there is a danger to the continued existence of clubs owned by companies and factories in key industries, which will presumably become targets in a war,” he adds.

Iran is one of the leading teams in Asian football. Although it has not won the Asian Cup since 1976, it regularly reaches the late stages of the tournament (a semi-final in 2023) and almost always qualifies for the World Cup (it has taken part in seven). At the same time, after years of sanctions and now the war, the general trend in Iranian football is negative. The national team failed at the World Cup, its clubs struggle to compete with Saudi teams in the Asian competitions, international matches are out of the question, and while there used to be Iranian legionnaires playing in Europe’s top leagues, most now play in smaller leagues or in the UAE and Qatar. Iran’s youth national teams, apart from the under-23 side, also struggle to deliver significant results. “Let us hope the mediation efforts succeed,” the journalist concludes. “Another direct war would be a severe blow to Iranian football, both in the near term and in the long term. In fact, one more war like that, and it will struggle to recover.”

This article was first published in Haaretz.

An official statement from the tournament’s organising committee, published on Tuesday morning, read: “The Asian Football Confederation, together with the Saudi Arabia 2027 AFC Asian Cup Local Organising Committee and the Saudi Arabian Football Federation, confirm that the upcoming edition of Asia’s premier national team tournament, originally scheduled to be played between January 7 and February 5, 2027, has been moved to December 23, 2027 through January 21, 2028.”

As noted, in recent weeks the tension and clashes between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis in Yemen have escalated. Beyond the kingdom’s oil facilities and factories, the Yemeni militia is now also attacking civilian sites, airports, ports and more. The events have led to several postponements and cancellations of football matches in Saudi Arabia over the past three weeks, in both the domestic league and the AFC Champions League.

In recent days, several checks were made on possible postponement dates. The Saudi organisers and the Asian confederation did not want to move the tournament, since they would now have to adjust the continental calendar, the World Cup qualifiers and club competitions, but there was no way around it.

The security assessments covered the Houthi front in Yemen, the clashes and fire from pro-Iranian militias in Iraq, and a growing chance of a war between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran on the other within the coming month. Given all this, it was decided not to take risks, as more and more federations whose teams are due to take part in the tournament expressed unease about the situation and asked not to fly to the region.

Importantly, in the past two weeks there were attempts by Iranian figures in Asian football to push for a postponement of the tournament, and it now seems that reality left no other choice. In addition, a source at the Asian confederation confirmed to BabaGol that Qatar had offered itself as a replacement host, but pressure from several Saudi figures, including large state-owned companies that sponsor the confederation and its competitions, dug in. They demanded that, if there was any change to the plans, it be only to the dates and not to the tournament’s location.

“This is the most responsible decision given what we know right now,” a source at the Asian confederation tells BabaGol. “The information that reached us showed that the conditions for continuing preparations in the original format and pace had become complicated. That is the regional and global reality at the moment, and we hope the situation will improve,” the source added.

“The organizing committee continues preparations in close coordination with the Asian confederation and all relevant stakeholders to deliver an unforgettable edition of the tournament, one that reflects the stature of Saudi Arabia and the aspirations of football fans from across Asia,” the short statement announcing the postponement concluded.

The winds of war are blowing again in the Middle East, and the shift of the 2027 Asian Cup by eleven months is the most significant event, in terms of its effect, on the world of sport in the region. All eyes now turn to Washington, Tel Aviv and Tehran to see what other changes, postponements and cancellations of events may occur in the coming weeks.

This article was first published in Haaretz.

The speaker is 1998 world champion Emmanuel Petit, the former France midfielder, in a video he posted online after the riots that took place in France on October 17.

Petit, who scored the third goal in that legendary final against Brazil 28 years ago, ranted at the camera for almost three minutes. He voiced his opposition to the recent events, in which masses of young people (about half a million across the country) demonstrated violently, smashed shop windows, looted goods from stores, burned cars and sprayed graffiti.

For the past two weeks France, and Paris in particular, has been on fire. Protests by hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, parents, university students, union members, protest groups, anarchists and others have swept the country. Most are young, many of them minors, from the lower classes. Some are the children of immigrants or of Arab and African descent, wrapping themselves in the flags of Algeria, Morocco, Palestine and others. They are the children of the suburbs.

These events hold up an interesting mirror to France’s complex social situation in the final year of President Emmanuel Macron’s term, as politicians on the French left, such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon, only fan the flames ahead of a highly complex election campaign in April 2027.

That mirror stands in almost complete contrast to the state of French football, which in recent years has experienced a true renaissance, not only in titles and standing but also in producing football talent. Most of that talent, like many of the protesters, comes from tough neighborhoods and lower-class immigrant communities and their descendants: French people of African, Arab and Muslim descent. The children of the suburbs.

This contrast tells the story of France over the past generation, and looking ahead as well.

What Happened in the Protests?

On September 17, at the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry high school in Créteil, a southeastern suburb of Paris, teachers, students and parents blocked the school entrance in protest over overcrowded classes (an average of about 35 pupils per class), teacher shortages, crumbling school buildings, air-conditioning problems and more.

Many underage protesters were arrested, which only enlarged the protest. More demonstrations over the level and quality of education in schools, and over the cost of living in general, flooded the schools of Paris’s suburbs and the city itself, along with other major cities such as Marseille, Lyon and Rennes.

The center of the riots, which in some cases also included property destruction, vandalism, looting, robbery and car burnings, is the République district of Paris and Place de la Bastille, one of the best-known symbols of French democracy, which was born out of a broad social protest against the elites in the eighteenth century, known to us as the French Revolution. It is partly from this that the French public’s passion for, and commitment to, demonstrating derives.

The current wave of protests had its first peak on the weekend of October 17, as noted, but the unrest has continued since then in various hot spots at varying intensity, and is expected to continue in the coming weeks, with an emphasis on this coming weekend and Saturday, October 31. The effects on French football were immediate.

Just last week, the league match between Paris Saint-Germain and Olympique Lyonnais, which was supposed to be played on Sunday evening, was moved to Monday to keep it from coinciding with the protests. The local police, who show very little ability or desire to deal with the protests and the rioters, were busy with an NFL game being played in Paris, and the assessment was that there were not enough forces to handle both events and the anti-government demonstrations at the same time. Matches in the coming round, such as Lyon against Angers and the games of Nice and Lorient, were also moved to other days and will be played in daylight or at quieter evening hours.

It is a phenomenon that emerges from the suburbs and sweeps through all of France. Interestingly, that is exactly what can be said of French football and French sport, which in recent years has experienced a true sporting renaissance that was likewise created in tough neighborhoods on the outskirts of the metropolises.

In under thirty years, France has won the World Cup twice, in 1998 and 2018, reached the final in 2006 and 2022, hosted and reached the final of Euro 2016, and was stopped at the semi-final stage at the most recent Euros and World Cup. France is a superpower of world football. Its strength lies in the fact that it has become an enormous reservoir of talent and one of the world’s leading centers for producing football talent, most of it coming from the suburbs of Paris and the country’s big cities. Perhaps the statistic that illustrates this best is that at the last World Cup, out of 1,248 players, around a hundred were born in France. That is about 8% of all the players in the tournament. Most of them, incidentally, did not represent France at all but the national teams of their parents’ origins. No country produced more players who took part in the last World Cup than France. Interestingly, most of these players were born in Paris and its suburbs.

To understand this connection between the children of the suburbs and the lower classes in France, football and the current wave of protests, we need to dig a little into history, into the suburbs of Paris, and into French success in football over the past generation.

The Suburbs Present: The Face of France Through Football

With all due respect to Marseille and Lyon, France has only one center: Paris. It is a city of almost 3 million people, in a metropolitan region, Île-de-France, of close to thirteen million, the largest in Europe. A true metropolis and a “center,” with everything that implies. In France, everything happens in Paris.

Paris, like other large European cities, is a rich cultural mix that blends classical Europe with West, Central and North Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean and Asia, all under the same “dream,” the French dream, with the same values, those of the Republic: Liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, fraternity).

Even so, Paris, which throughout history has been a global focal point in so many fields, from art through architecture, literature, philosophy, food and more, did not excel at football. In the last generation, that has been changing.

At the end of the Second World War, France was largely in ruins. Cities were destroyed, infrastructure too, and everything had to be rebuilt. The French government recruited cheap labor to rebuild the country. Hundreds of thousands of workers from southern and eastern Europe, from countries such as Poland and Portugal, as well as from France’s North African colonies, Algeria and Tunisia, made their way to the big cities of France. According to French immigration ministry data, in the 1940s and 1950s France took in over a million immigrants, more than any other European country at the time.

In the 1960s, as the colonies broke away and masses of people fled in search of a better future, the economy grew dramatically, and the need for more hands led to another wave of immigration, of more workers. This time they came from the colonies in West Africa, the Middle East and the Caribbean.

Many of these immigrants also came to the big cities. Paris, Marseille and Lyon all became magnets for people from other cultures. The city centers were already crowded and packed, so the government and the labor-supply companies operating at the time settled and housed the workers on the outskirts of those cities, in identical-looking apartment blocks. In the blocks of the suburbs. These areas are called the banlieues.

At the same time, from the 1960s to the mid-1970s, French sport was in acute crisis, especially the national football team. In those decades France failed to qualify for three World Cups and three European Championships. The French federation decided that, to get out of the crisis, it needed to develop a network of academies to nurture football talent.

That is exactly what they did. From the late 1970s, such a network of academies, the first of its kind in Europe, did open, in a collaboration between the government, local municipal authorities, the federation and football clubs. All these bodies cooperated to recruit and train local youngsters with the aim of turning them into professional footballers.

Quite quickly, this system, which also included information sharing, regular updates and tracking, managed to monitor a huge amount of young talent among immigrant populations and their children. If a talented kid was kicking a ball in some remote Paris suburb, the federation knew his name and had his details. In 1988, the National Football Academy opened in the forest in the Paris suburb of Clairefontaine, in what was to become one of the best academies in the world.

Over the years, Clairefontaine educated the best French footballers, who came from all over the country, but quite a few of them came from Paris and its banlieues. Thierry Henry, Nicolas Anelka, Hatem Ben Arfa, Olivier Giroud, and one who is today the face of the phenomenon, Kylian Mbappé. These are just a few examples of top players who were born in the Paris suburbs and represented France. From these suburbs, and from those of other big cities in France, came top footballers who in recent years have represented the national teams of their parents and grandparents: Riyad Mahrez for Algeria, Kalidou Koulibaly for Senegal, Ayyoub Bouaddi for Morocco and others.

Clairefontaine is the jewel in the crown of the rare talent-management system that France, and Paris in particular, built up. The children of the suburbs played football, entered the system, developed, and it delivered results.

In 1998, France hosted a World Cup for the first time in its history. Until then, France had won a single European Championship, in 1984, and the Olympic gold medal in football that same year. Les Bleus were considered a talented but rather unsuccessful team. But that generation marked the revolution. The coach of that team, Aimé Jacquet, handed the reins to a man named Zinedine Zidane, and it paid off. France won the World Cup after an impressive 3-0 victory over the great Brazil of Ronaldo (Nazário) in the final, with a brace from Zidane, the son of Algerian immigrants, born in Marseille. Zidane became the face of French football, and the celebrations swept the country.

At the time, it also seemed like a turning point for the French in relations between the different groups in French society. The fact that the team was made up of players from all the different groups in society gave the France team of that era a “multicultural” layer, one that blurred tensions that had existed for years between whites and blacks, between Muslims and Christians, between rich and poor. Zidane was the face of the team, but not only he. The rest of the squad were also the sons of immigrant families, and a not-insignificant number were even immigrants themselves. They were the face of the new France. The France team was nicknamed “Black-Blanc-Beur” (black-white-Arab, “beur” being back-slang for “Arabe”), a play on “Bleu-Blanc-Rouge” (blue-white-red), the nickname of the French flag after its colors.

This success continued at Euro 2000, and even at the 2006 World Cup, when France reached the final and lost to Italy on penalties. Within eight years, the French team, which included many players from the suburbs, Muslims and players of African origin, had become one of the best in the world.

From Le Pen to Qatar: Not Everything Is Perfect

Alongside the successes and the general rise in football’s popularity in France, not all French people liked it. Politicians from the far right, such as Jean-Marie Le Pen in his day, spoke out against immigrants and Muslims and the fact that they were becoming the “new French heroes.” The success began to crack the delicate social fabric.

Indeed, when things worked less well on the pitch, the harmony, including within the national team, cracked and broke. At the 2010 World Cup, a dressing-room mutiny led by Nicolas Anelka, Patrice Evra and William Gallas, along with France’s collapse in the group stage in a group with hosts South Africa, Mexico and Uruguay, let the ethnic demon of France out of the bottle. “This team doesn’t represent France in any way, and these players don’t deserve to be called French,” said Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie’s daughter, who, like her father, holds fairly extreme views toward anyone who is not roughly a white Frenchman.

Over the years there were several more affairs and scandals that put French football and French society to the test, such as the case of the underage escort in the national team, or the blackmail affair involving Mathieu Valbuena, orchestrated by friends of national team star Karim Benzema, born in a Lyon suburb to Algerian parents and later considered the best footballer in the world (2022). At the center of these affairs, too, were outstanding footballers, children of the suburbs who became stars and got rich from the game. While the French establishment and mainstream criticized them, young people in those same suburbs admired them.

A year later, Qatar bought Paris Saint-Germain through its sports investment fund, QSI, opening a new era of Gulf principalities’ influence and soft power through football, and doing so in the City of Light. At first Qatar invested billions to bring superstars to Paris, wanting to win the Champions League, put the principality’s name on the European football map and increase its power in the West.

Meanwhile, at national-team level the trend continued. France kept growing as a powerhouse of football talent and a genuine football superpower. It hosted Euro 2016 and lost only to Portugal in the final. The team at that tournament was already made up mostly of players of African and Arab origin. The defeat did not hurt it, and at the 2018 World Cup in Russia France went all the way, with more children of the suburbs at the front. Samuel Umtiti, Paul Pogba and Kylian Mbappé, from the Paris suburb of Bondy, the son of an Algerian mother and a Cameroonian father, as the star of the present and the future.

Mbappé and France kept growing, reaching the 2022 World Cup final and the 2026 World Cup semi-final. Mbappé himself became the leading player at Real Madrid and one of the best players in the world.

At club level, it took time to get going. Qatar’s investment in PSG was not so successful in the early years. The club signed huge names and dominated the French league to the point of crushing the competition, but in Europe it did not work. That changed when they began investing in local youngsters from across France and Paris specifically. After Mbappé left for Real Madrid, Ousmane Dembélé, Désiré Doué, Bradley Barcola and Warren Zaïre-Emery, all of the same profile, are among the names responsible for Paris Saint-Germain winning the Champions League two years in a row. They are the best team in Europe and probably the world, and look on course for another win in the cup with the big ears.

From the suburbs to the Champions League, in every sense. And yet all that glitters is not the Champions League trophy. It can also be a watch looted from a shop in central Paris.

Integration Through Football? Really?

So how does this dissonance arise between the share of the children of immigrants, residents of the suburbs, in French football’s success and their share in the harsh protests seen in Paris?

About thirty-eight percent of all the immigrants who arrived in France in the last century settled in the area of the capital, in what became “the other Paris.” The Paris of the banlieues, the suburbs.

In France, “banlieues” has more than one meaning. The first is suburbs: residential areas close to the city but outside it, with detached houses, lovely gardens, good cars and a pleasant atmosphere.

But when the French say “banlieues,” they do not mean suburbs only in that classic sense of the word, but in a more loaded one. In this sense, banlieues means housing blocks: projects built by income level, which is usually low. Some call them poverty traps, or “immigrant ghettos.”

Île-de-France, the Paris region, home to 18.2% of France’s entire population, consists of eight departments: one for the city itself and about seven around it. Within each department are hundreds of towns and small cities, close to 600 municipal councils in all, and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of neighborhoods. Over the years, many of these neighborhoods have become places plagued by crime, unemployment and poverty, and by and large have existed in a state of ongoing crisis. The suburbs lag behind the rest of France, and especially behind Paris proper, in every field, by tens of percentage points. As of early 2025, about 38% of banlieue residents live below the poverty line, compared with 16% in the rest of France; 25% of banlieue residents are unemployed, compared with under 9% in the rest of the country; and among those under 25 the figure worsens, with 45% of young people in the suburbs unemployed, 20 points more than young French people who do not live in the suburbs.

Between three and five million people live in these suburbs, suffering social and economic discrimination. In effect, the banlieues are like a parallel country, a country of people with fewer opportunities. A country within a country. It is no accident that many of the young people in these suburbs are the ones who have taken to the streets of the capital in the recent protests.

Despite all the difficulties, the banlieues systematically produce one product: footballers. Talented ones, truly.

The phenomenon owes much to the French football system, which identifies talent at young ages and, through regional councils, schools and small local clubs, allows a player’s development to be followed from a very young age. In addition, most children in the suburbs have no alternative to football. The children see the stars who came from backgrounds like their own, and so football becomes an almost exclusive refuge, and certainly the most coveted one.

The best example is Les Ulis, a rather isolated suburb southwest of Paris. It does not even have an RER station, the rail network that runs through the suburbs and into the city center. Three players you may know came out of this suburb: Thierry Henry, Patrice Evra and Anthony Martial.

You could say a fascinating melting pot has formed in the banlieues. Young people of African, Arab, Caribbean and other origins, who arrive with athletic attributes different from those found in France, live a hard daily reality that steers them toward football or toward less legitimate pursuits, while the country’s network of football clubs and academies offers them an escape. That, and the ball, on the pitch and on the street, every day, from morning to night. This, many people believe, is what makes Paris the number one reservoir of football talent in the world. “Paris is already the biggest talent pool in the world after São Paulo,” said Arsène Wenger in 2010. In 2026, it looks as if Paris is close to overtaking even the Brazilian metropolis, which is a talent-producing factory.

The role model of the banlieue is Kylian Mbappé. His mother is Algerian, his father Cameroonian, and he grew up in Bondy, a rather neglected Paris suburb, playing for the municipal youth team. From there he moved to the Clairefontaine academy, then to Monaco, and then became the second most expensive player in the history of the game when Paris Saint-Germain bought him for 180 million dollars. In 2018 he led France to the World Cup title at 18, and today he is Real Madrid’s biggest star and the player who produced the best individual performance in World Cup history in 2026.

It is important to understand that a success story like Mbappé’s is not representative at all. In a study by two Danish researchers, Sine Agergaard and Jan Kahr Sørensen, in Denmark in 2009, they found that half of all young people aged 10 to 16 in the suburbs of Danish cities were children of immigrants and minorities. In a survey of suburban neighborhoods in Danish cities, 93.6% of immigrant children and 89.5% of children from other ethnic backgrounds took part in sports activities regularly, compared with 87.4% of “native” Danish children from the same area.

The Danish researchers’ study shows that despite the big dreams and high participation rates at young ages, very few of those young people from immigrant families become professional footballers. Less than one percent. According to studies in France and in Paris, footballers from the suburbs make up almost a quarter of every French national team, but out of the hundreds of thousands of young people who play, those are very small numbers.

This creates a situation in which youth from the suburbs look with admiration at the chosen few who did manage to escape the reality into which they were born in the suburbs, want to be and live like them, and build up frustration when it doesn’t happen. That is why you often see the celebrations and the riots of fans of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and even Senegal when their national teams win the Africa Cup of Nations or win a match at the World Cup, especially against France. And also when they lose. These young people feel far more culturally connected to the countries of origin of their parents and themselves, and they are frustrated. And when there is frustration, people go out into the streets.

The Perfect Dissonance of Reality

As expected in protests on such a large scale, there are voices opposing the protest, and some even argue that Qatari elements have a hand in it, particularly given the combination of struggles expressed in the demonstrations, with the flags of North African countries and calls to free Palestine. So far, no evidence has been published to prove such involvement in the protests.

Qatar is one of the biggest investors in France, in projects ranging from culture and sport to energy, real estate and more. Nasser Al-Khelaifi, who heads PSG, is the face of Qatari influence in France, not only in sport but also culturally and politically. Al-Khelaifi, for those who have forgotten, took part in talks on a hostage deal held in 2024 at the Élysée Palace.

Has the Qatari influence that began in football through Paris Saint-Germain now moved through politicians and reached the Parisian street and the suburbs? Possibly, but that remains to be examined.

So Emmanuel Petit, one of the heroes of France’s 1998 World Cup win, is angry, but it is impossible to ignore the mirror of dissonance that the suburbs of Paris and France’s big cities hold up to French society. On one hand, they produce the raw material from which France became one of the world’s leading football nations. On the other, the suburbs are also the breeding ground of the largest wave of protests in France this century, and it is hard to see when, how or whether it will end soon. That is France’s trade-off today.

France needs an approach of inclusion, given its colonial history and centuries of resource exploitation, the low investment in immigrant populations and their descendants, and the sporting achievements these groups bring it.
On one hand, France as a country enjoys a sporting renaissance, particularly in football, thanks in no small part to the children of immigrants and French people of African and Muslim-country origin. Together with their encounter with the French establishment, the education system, the sports ministry, the football federation and local authorities, one of the world’s leading talent pools was created.

On the other hand, this does not seem to truly help narrow gaps, create a real and widespread sense of belonging, or bring full integration into society for these classes, and it comes at a price for society at large, part of which is expressed in the protests we are seeing.

So France today is in a situation where, on one hand, its national team, footballers and athletes come from society’s weaker strata and become cultural heroes, while at the same time the masses in those very same strata take to the streets to protest, at times to loot and vandalize, creating huge class and racial tension that, in a sense, tells the story of France’s identity crisis as of 2026 in the most striking way there is.

A version of this article was first published in Haaretz.

The Houthis have been attacking Saudi Arabia for weeks. In the Al-Nassr dressing room, Cristiano Ronaldo waited with his teammates for developments and, while he was at it, made a gesture of solidarity with the country where he plays. Pictures from the dressing room show Ronaldo kissing the Saudi crossed-swords emblem on the Al-Nassr shirt, a gesture that warmed the hearts of the Saudi public and, of course, of his employers. Al-Nassr eventually won the match, and Ronaldo again wrapped himself in the Saudi flag and saluted the local crowd at King Saud University Stadium in the Saudi capital.

“I’m Portuguese, but my heart belongs to Saudi Arabia,” he wrote in an Instagram post that evening.

The tension between the Houthis in Yemen and Saudi Arabia continues to make headlines and shape the agenda in the Middle East, with effects that could be dramatic for the 2027 Asian Cup, scheduled to take place in Saudi Arabia this coming January.

Over the past month and a half, the Yemeni Shiite militia has been attacking Saudi Arabia, with missiles and drones hitting oil facilities, ports, airports, military bases, strategic sites and key infrastructure, causing casualties and property damage. The most dramatic incident came on October 10, when a strike on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh killed 13 people and wounded hundreds more.

The United States, Britain and other countries are rallying to the Saudis’ side, some by sending fighter and interceptor aircraft and others through operational coordination. The United Arab Emirates agreed to renew its involvement in the war against the Houthis in exchange for air cover from the Saudis. Egypt is also on alert to send forces to Saudi Arabia, and the Americans have already issued an unusual warning to their citizens in the region. As things look, it is no longer far-fetched that Israel and Iran could be drawn into the fray or, alternatively, widen the circle of fire.

In short, about two months before the Asian Cup kicks off in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf has the atmosphere of a real war. It is already seeping into football in the region, and it is already shaking the Saudis’ preparations for the tournament in the near term and for the 2034 World Cup in the longer term.

A series of events planned for the end of the month and the start of November have already been cancelled: FIFA’s e-Games World Cup, the Riyadh international golf tournament and the road cycling world championships. The “Six Kings Slam” tennis tournament has been postponed from October to December.

In the current situation, there is a real danger that the Asian Cup will not take place in Saudi Arabia in January 2027 as planned. The tournament, due to be held in Jeddah, Riyadh and Khobar between January 7 and February 5, is an important milestone in the Saudis’ preparations to host the 2034 World Cup, with FIFA representatives and giant corporations set to circulate among the stadiums.

In the past two weeks, speculation and rumours have spread about a postponement of the tournament to January 2028 because of the Houthi attacks, as more and more federations that need to send teams to the tournament fear a further flare-up. The players’ union and the football association in South Korea, among the most powerful bodies in Asian football, have already said they would rather postpone the tournament than put players at risk by flying over Saudi airspace between venues. The Japanese federation, another dominant body in East Asia, was among the first to cancel its delegation’s trip to Saudi Arabia for the e-Games. That does not necessarily mean they will act the same way over the Asian Cup, but it certainly shows they have no problem acting unilaterally when the security situation in Saudi Arabia is tense.

The organisers are trying to project business as usual. The tournament’s organising committee has announced that preparations are continuing as normal, and the president of the Asian Football Confederation, Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa of Bahrain, spoke on the subject. “We can wait and see what happens until the end of November. We can postpone to January 2028 and make the adjustments, but we are following events, and in this region everything can change by then,” he said at the confederation’s presidents’ and general secretaries’ conference in Tokyo earlier this week.

The fact that the AFC president himself mentions the possibility of a postponement says a lot. But in the meantime, in the corridors of the continent’s largest confederation, there are those pushing for a postponement and perhaps something even more extreme.

Sources on the confederation’s executive committee tell BabaGol that some of the delegates, including officials from the Iranian federation, are “promoting the possibility of a one-year postponement,” in effect pushing the tournament to January 2028. From Iran’s perspective, the Saudis are bitter rivals on the oil market, in the waters of the Gulf, on the football pitch and, as it turns out, in the confederation’s corridors, and such a delay would put a spoke in the wheels of Saudi efforts and preparations for the event that really matters: the 2034 World Cup.

The same sources add that the Iranians are not the only ones trying to change the original plan for the upcoming Asian Cup. Influential Qatari figures in the AFC have also proposed Qatar and its World Cup-grade football infrastructure as an alternative venue for holding the tournament on its original dates.

For now, neither option is under discussion, because the AFC and the Saudis want to project business as usual. To signal to any doubters that they are calm and confident the tournament will go ahead as planned, the Saudis have already released the full match and stadium schedule. “All preparations at the organizational and operational level are continuing as usual, including renovations and infrastructure for fan services,” read a press release. “We are committed to delivering the tournament at the highest level and, at the same time, are monitoring developments to ensure that the conditions for hosting a successful tournament still exist.” This statement leaves the Saudis with every option in the event of further escalation with the Houthis. On the one hand, they are moving forward; on the other, they are ready for change.

The opening match is due to be played at King Fahd Stadium in Riyadh, which is still being renovated ahead of the event, and will pit hosts Saudi Arabia against none other than Palestine, in front of 72,000 spectators.

At the previous Asian Cup, held in Qatar in January 2024, the Qatari organisers devoted the entire opening ceremony to the Palestinians, to Gaza and to the war. It will be interesting to see what the Saudis do, against the backdrop of their covert and overt rivalry with the Qataris and the fact that the Palestinians are playing in the first match.

Another team due to take part in the tournament is Yemen. Not the Houthi one, of course, but the team representing the leadership based in Aden and backed by the Saudis. Even so, the symbolism of a Yemeni team playing in Saudi Arabia at the Asian Cup against the backdrop of a war between the two countries, in a group with South Korea, Vietnam and the UAE, which is also involved in the conflict as noted, is the stuff of legends in Middle Eastern football.

All of these scenarios should be taken with a grain of salt. They will be relevant only if the tournament goes ahead as planned. For now, there appear to be several possibilities: sticking to the schedule, postponement or relocation. At the same time, there are those pulling the tournament in each direction and even trying to promote alternatives. It may still be far off, but if the Asian Cup is indeed postponed or, God forbid, moved to another country, it would hurt the Saudis’ timetable and preparations for the flagship project of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030: the 2034 World Cup. In the Middle East, in Asia and around the world, people are watching with concern or with anticipation, depending on which side of the geopolitical map they sit on.

This article has been published first in Haaretz.

It was the first, and so far the only, title won by an Arab club in our football, achieved through wonderful joint work between Arabs and Jews. To this day, the story symbolises the power and diversity of Israeli football, an almost unique arena where Arabs and Jews live side by side and play on a fully meritocratic basis, with real sporting equality. One of the players who was the face of that season and of that Cup was the late Lior Asulin, who this year, three years ago, was murdered at the Nova festival on October 7, 2023.

This evening at 17:00, at the Doha Stadium in Sakhnin, a ceremony and a special match will be held in his memory, at the club’s initiative. Asulin’s family will attend, along with a series of players and legends from the great 2004 Cup-winning team. The match pits members of that team, coached by the man who managed Sakhnin at the time, Eyal Lahman, against Sakhnin’s current senior squad, coached by Yossi Abuksis.

There will be a minute of silence with applause, and the match will kick off at 17:15, with Abbas Suan, Kamoko Kamara, Ernest Atchi and Gabriel Lima taking the field. Public figures and schoolchildren from the village and the surrounding area have been invited. “The aim is to remember, and to remind people of, the late Lior’s commitment to the club, which greatly strengthened the belief in the power of sport to connect people,” the club said in a statement ahead of the match.

The event comes after criticism heard more than once in recent years that Sakhnin had not done enough to commemorate the player who was the star of that season, having scored twice in the final in a 4-1 victory over Hapoel Haifa.

“Lior was a senior and significant partner in the club’s historic achievement, he was very much loved, and everyone who was at the club at the time has only good memories of him,” Bnei Sakhnin told BabaGol. “The club holds great respect for the late Lior and for his family, who asked for a dignified and fitting ceremony, and that is exactly what it will be.”

The event signals winds of change at Sakhnin this season. But first, to understand its meaning and its importance within Israeli football culture, one has to understand who Lior Asulin was, as a player and as a person.

A Player Who Embodied Real Israeli Football

Asulin was never an international, and he did not star for clubs like Maccabi Tel Aviv or Maccabi Haifa. He grew up at Maccabi Herzliya and passed through Maccabi Petah Tikva before arriving at Sakhnin. There he knew a legendary year, as noted, and moved on to Beitar Jerusalem, where he also shone and became a fan favorite. He went on to play for Bnei Yehuda, Hapoel Tel Aviv and Hapoel Be’er Sheva in the Premier League, had a brief spell in Cyprus, and played for a string of clubs in the second tier and the lower leagues. From conversations with players who played alongside him and coaches who worked with him, the impression is that Asulin was a real guy and a real footballer. Not a star with airs, but someone who loved the game at whatever level he played it. In many ways he was Israeli football in its truest form: the one who comes from below and surprises and moves you. A bit like that friend you played with in the neighborhood as kids, who years later turned out to have made the dream come true, and whom you talk about proudly at Friday dinner. Asulin did exactly that, and in a big way. Even as a veteran, he looked after and took care of the younger players, as Omer Atzili, who played with him at Hapoel Rishon LeZion and stayed in close touch with him over the years, has often testified.

Over his career, Asulin scored around 180 goals, many of them beautiful ones. Real football goals. Because, once again, Asulin was a real person, and that is why he was also a real footballer. His approach to the game was a positive one, about fun: putting a smile on the faces of the fans and his teammates, and celebrating goals. Friends say he was the same in life, which did not always take him to good places, and yet in spite of everything, in his final years he coached children, giving them from his experience and his mistakes, and guiding them.

Paying Respects in a Complicated Reality

Since October 7, 2023, many clubs in Israeli football have paid their respects to Asulin in different ways. Abroad, too, magazines and media outlets marked his death, recalling Sakhnin’s Cup triumph and the small club’s short UEFA Cup run the following season, with its famous two-legged tie against Newcastle United.

There was something moving, innocent and historic in the connection between Asulin and Sakhnin. It was a different version of Israeli football as we know it today, something softer, and in many ways a symbol of a different Israel. Jews, Arabs, Muslims and Christians giving everything on the pitch together, playing shoulder to shoulder, achieving something huge, making history for a village in the north and placing it at the front of the European football stage.

Still, as noted, over the past two years there has been harsh criticism of Sakhnin for not properly expressing condolences for their former player, who was murdered by Hamas after coming to the party to celebrate his 43rd birthday, which fell on October 6.

On several occasions, family members spoke about the matter in the media and said the club had sent no representatives to the funeral and had not come to the shiva. The club did publish a statement expressing sorrow on social media in the days after the murder, but held no public gesture of solidarity, and it was evident that this pained Asulin’s family very much.

“Over the past two years we were surprised and disappointed that no representative of the club came to Lior’s funeral or the shiva,” Ortal Asulin, Lior’s sister, tells BabaGol. “But a week ago they contacted us and explained that they wanted to hold a dignified event, to be broadcast on television, and we consulted within the family. We wondered whether the anthem would be played and whether there would be a condemnation of the acts, and we had many questions, but the conversation with the spokesman and the new owner (Khaled Duchy) surprised us very pleasantly, and we decided to come and take part,” she explains.

Not all of the family will attend, as some are still hurt, but for Ortal it matters. “Anywhere they mention my brother, I will be there,” she says. “I know that if Lior, who always saw the good in people, had seen this initiative, he would have supported it and would have wanted us to take part.”

The family did want to make sure that no political figures would take part in the event, and that the ceremony and match would not be turned into a show tied to the election season. Indeed, several political figures who had been planning to attend, among them Mazen Ghnaim, who was Sakhnin’s chairman during the Cup season, will not take an active part in the ceremony.

At the club, the family explains, they were very attentive to the family and its requests regarding the event, and that is what led them to agree to take part.

A New Sakhnin?

The initiative to organize the match and ceremony reflects a major change that Bnei Sakhnin went through this past summer. After fourteen years, some of them very stormy, particularly in the relationship between the club and the media and the wider public, chairman Mohammad Abu Younis, who did a great deal for the team, left. The last few years were especially hard. Since October 7, there have been several incidents that clouded relations between the club and its fans and the rest of the Israeli football community, sometimes not their fault at all and sometimes with them as full partners. These included incidents in which the crowd did not respect the anthem, the incident with Be’er Sheva fans at Turner Stadium, and the team’s announcer, who was accused of collaborating with the enemy over an interview with a channel identified with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Together they created a very negative picture.

The reality in which Sakhnin has existed for years as the only Arab club in the top flight repeatedly confronts it with sensitive and highly complex challenges in how it addresses the different audiences within Arab society in Israel and the wider public. In times of war, this was even harder. The demand and expectation from Jewish society that the club condemn and speak out, in ways that did not always align with the identity of the society it represents, created gaps and rifts between Sakhnin and Israeli football. A change in management approach and public image was called for.

The man who stepped into Abu Younis’s shoes is Khaled Duchy, who served as CEO and board member for years, and so far things look different. People around him tell BabaGol that there is a thought and a desire to bring Sakhnin back to the identity the club had in the past, and Duchy saw that the time and the moment had come for a meaningful gesture for one of its legends. It is not only the match in Asulin’s memory. During the most recent Sukkot holiday, the team visited Kibbutz Hannaton, with the players and coach Abuksis meeting a rabbi at the synagogue and children from the kibbutz. “Sakhnin is part of Israeli society, and it represents the place of Arab society in Israel and in Israeli society at large,” the club says. “Positive social action is important precisely at this time, and the event in Asulin’s memory is part of that.”

Better Late Than Never

The 2004 Cup that Asulin won with Sakhnin was the peak of Lior Asulin’s career as a footballer. It was an occasion in which he served as the central hero: the hero of a great football story in our history, and a story about Israel as it was then, or as many would like it to be today and in the future.

So why is this match happening now? Perhaps it is the new management. Perhaps it is also the expectation and demand from elements in Israeli football that Sakhnin “condemn” and “take a side,” which put pressure on the club to express solidarity or hold such an act. And perhaps it is simply because of the complexity of life and existence in Israel under the shadow of a hard war, as we have been living in recent years. It may also be a combination of all of these factors. The truth? For people at the club, it matters less. “Whoever wants to reduce polarization in Israeli society will view the event positively. Whoever immediately asks ‘but why now?’ will probably always look for the flaw.”

Some three years after he was murdered, Lior Asulin will receive great honor from the club to which he gave truly epic, historic sporting moments. “This is not closing a circle, because there is no circle. A person’s memory must always be honored,” they say in Sakhnin.

It would have been good had such an event happened earlier, but now is better than never. Especially at this time, when Israeli society is divided and tense, at a decisive crossroads over the future of this place, the ceremony and match in Asulin’s memory can offer a taste of a future and a reality that we have almost forgotten we deserve: to experience and live cross-sector, cross-origin cooperation, in simple solidarity that is not necessarily political but human, with football holding it all together.

This article was first published on Haaretz.

Eight sides took part in the competition during September-October, drawn from across Israel’s African communities: Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Kenya, South Sudan, Sudan, Uganda, Cameroon and Tanzania. They were split into two groups.

Sudan proved the most popular team of the tournament. Hundreds of spectators turned out for their matches, in a neighbourhood that is home to many members of Israel’s African community.

The semi-final between Sudan and the Ivory Coast produced scenes with hundreds of fans perched along the fences to watch. The Elephants won 5-1 to reach the final, where they would face Nigeria, who had beaten Kenya in the other semi-final.

The final itself was tightly contested between Ivory Coast and Nigeria. Ivory Coast came out on top 3-2, with the match still in the balance in the closing minutes, to win the tournament.

The tournament was organised by a group of asylum seekers from Sudan, led by Mohanad Abdelmoneim. Together, they founded the Sudan national team in Israel, which in turn inspired the creation of the other sides. The event was backed by Joey Low, a Jewish philanthropist who invests in and supports different initiatives in Israel, especially among its African community.

“There is a large community of Africans in Israel, and we want to connect them to this place. Israel’s image in Africa needs to change,” said Pastor Alberts Wanga, founder of Africa Blesses Israel, an organisation is dedicated to ties between African countries and Israel.

Nigeria’s ambassador to Israel, Ms Nkechi L. Ufochukwu, said the event was a welcome one. “Sport connects people to people, and people to a place, and football is an integral part of Nigerian identity and culture,” she added. “This is simply a wonderful initiative, and I hope there will be more like it in the coming future.”

Photos are courtesy of Uri Levy/BabaGol©

Hapoel Be’er Sheva published this statement last Thursday, ahead of the club’s second-round Europa League match at AZ Alkmaar.

Three years after October 7, the story seems to be slipping under the radar of Israel’s intense pre-election news cycle.

Still, it is hard to ignore what has been happening in the Netherlands in recent years. This is a country with a rich Jewish history and folklore, particularly in football, and with strong ties to Israel. Yet it is now unwilling to take responsibility for a few hundred Israelis coming to watch a match.

The Road to the Stadium Runs Through the Jewish Market

It wasn’t always like this. One of the great symbols of the Jewish and Israeli connection to Dutch football is the country’s biggest club, Ajax Amsterdam.

Ajax was founded in 1900, in an Amsterdam where football loyalties were divided by neighborhood. “Ajax’s home ground, even before De Meer, was called the Houten Stadion (the Wooden Stadium), and it sat in the east of the city, right next to the Jewish quarter,” explains Assaf Cohen, a Sport1 analyst and an expert on Dutch football. “Back then, matches in the Netherlands were played on Sundays, and visiting teams arriving in Amsterdam would come to Central Station and then walk through the Jewish quarter to reach Ajax’s ground. On a Sunday, all of Amsterdam is closed, naturally, and only the Jewish market is open. So the opposing players and fans would say, ‘We’re going to play at the Jews’.”

Before the Second World War, for many years, the Jews who lived in Amsterdam called it “the Jerusalem of the West,” much as Jewish communities in Spain and North Africa did for centuries, using the name for places where life was good for Jews.

“Amsterdam always welcomed foreigners, and Jews,” Cohen notes. “Especially after the expulsion from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century, it was one of the only places that told them, ‘Please, come. Here everyone is equal.’” Baruch Spinoza, one of the most important Jewish philosophers, was born, lived and worked in Amsterdam. Locals call the city “Mokum,” Yiddish for “place,” and hundreds of other Yiddish words have entered the local slang.

That is partly how Ajax and its fans acquired one of their best-known nicknames, one still identified with the club today: “Super Juden,” the Jews.

There are various reasons for the bond between Amsterdam’s Jews and Ajax, and one stands out: in the early twentieth century, the Netherlands was a fairly devout Protestant Christian country. “At least until the war, Dutch society was very, very Calvinist and conservative,” Cohen explains. “You weren’t allowed to enjoy yourself, and you weren’t allowed to show outwardly that you were enjoying yourself. Now, Ajax is enjoyment. Football is enjoyment. So who went to football? The Jews went.”

Jewish players also turned out for Ajax over the years. “Ajax is not a Jewish club, but it is a club with Jews, because they were part of the city, and of course there were also players among them. Sjaak Swart, ‘Mister Ajax,’ the man with the most appearances for the team, is a Jew whose family lives in Israel today.” Names such as Eddy Hamel and Bennie Muller also starred in Ajax colors, and at certain periods the club had Jewish sponsors, such as the Van Praag family.

Ajax’s connection to Jewish identity in Amsterdam, from then until now, also includes difficult stories from the Second World War, when Jews were stripped of club membership under the racial laws the Nazi occupiers imposed on the Dutch authorities.

Even so, history cannot be rewritten. The Netherlands was among the first countries to offer Israel assistance during the Yom Kippur War, and today you can still find Israeli players in Dutch football. Oscar Gloukh is Ajax’s number 10, Stav Lemkin plays for Twente, and last season Eli Dasa was an important player at NEC Nijmegen.

So what is happening in the Netherlands that, despite all this history, AZ Alkmaar, the local authorities and even UEFA have decided not to allow Israeli fans to travel and support their team in a Europa League match?

The Social Climate and Dutch Domestic Politics

Official and diplomatic sources in Israel and the Netherlands confirm that relations between the two countries have worsened over the past year. The Netherlands is now governed by a minority government built on three parties from the country’s political left, center and soft right. According to the polls, the left-wing Pro party will be the largest party in the coalition, and to avoid losing voters, the government is now trying to move somewhat in line with its tune.

The mood in the Netherlands, especially after three years of war in Gaza and Lebanon, is that Israel is a state that stands in opposition to international law. At the same time, the country has seen a rise in antisemitic incidents over the past two years, along with demonstrations in support of Hamas, including last weekend around the events marking October 7. But it does not stop at street protests. The Netherlands has a public academic boycott of Israeli institutions. More recently, it has also imposed a ban on trade in goods from, and with businesses operating in, Judea and Samaria, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Selling Israeli products from these areas can carry a prison sentence of up to six years. For now, this is the most extreme position in the European Union on trade with Israel, and the Netherlands is the first country to take it.

In addition, Amsterdam and the Netherlands have a Muslim population, mainly of Moroccan and Turkish origin, which is highly prominent at any event connected to Israel.

This social and political climate is tied to the events in Amsterdam in November 2024, when Maccabi Tel Aviv arrived in the city for a Europa League match against Ajax. As will be remembered, a march by Maccabi Tel Aviv fans before the game, and the violence by local residents against Israeli fans afterwards, led to two very tense days in the city and a long police and legal saga.

Alkmaar’s mayor, Anja Schouten, claimed that the city council and the local police “cannot guarantee the safety of the fans who remain in the city.” The ban was publicly encouraged by Amsterdam’s mayor, Femke Halsema, who knows that fans would want to stay in Amsterdam and who, for her part, wants to avoid at all costs a repeat of what happened in November 2024.

In response to an inquiry from BabaGol, AZ Alkmaar said: “The municipality, the police and the public prosecutor decided that away fans would not be allowed at the match. AZ respects this decision and is complying with the guidelines of the relevant authorities. We understand that this decision provokes different reactions and opinions in society, and we respect that people hold different views on the matter. Our responsibility is to organize a safe and responsible match within the framework set by UEFA and the competent authorities.”

“It’s a completely technical matter,” argues Erik-Jan Brinkman, a journalist at the Dutch outlet NH Nieuws. “It’s a shame, and I understand the disappointment of the Hapoel [Be’er Sheva] fans, but the mayor received the information and the authorities said what they were capable of doing. So that’s the situation.”

Brinkman goes on to explain something that is less familiar to Israelis. “Obviously, there is a connection to the fact that an Israeli crowd and an Israeli team bring pro- and anti-Israel protests with them. But this is a more general practice than the Israeli issue. You have to understand that Alkmaar’s fans have a problem with away supporters. It’s nothing new. It happened in the past with West Ham fans who came here, and with fans of teams from Poland, in cases that involved serious violence, and the local police are careful with them, as they are with extremist fans all over the Netherlands,” he tells BabaGol in a conversation from the Netherlands. “For years, Ajax fans haven’t gone to Rotterdam, and vice versa, and there are other fixtures in the Netherlands where the local police prefer to keep away fans from attending.”

Asked whether the Netherlands has changed its attitude toward Israel or toward Jews, Brinkman answers: “You have to separate the safety issue from what is happening in Dutch society at large. After October 7, there was a great deal of identification with Israel, but as the war went on, people began to question its conduct. It’s true that the attitude toward Israel and Israeli teams has become more negative during this period, but that doesn’t necessarily say anything about the attitude toward every Israeli in the Netherlands. The fans not coming is a safety and preventive matter, based on past events and the current political climate. I hope that in the future things calm down and that Israeli fans, and fans of any team, will be able to come here and everywhere to support their side.”

Israeli Fans? Not All of Them, but as a Group - ‘Persona Non Grata’

Brinkman’s insights put the notion that Israeli fans are pariahs in European football into some perspective, but it is hard to argue with the broader picture today. Belgium moved a match off its territory, and so did Ireland. And in Birmingham last year, when Maccabi Tel Aviv traveled to play Aston Villa, police decided to bar Maccabi fans from attending on the basis of a report generated by artificial intelligence.

So even if the average Dutchman is probably indifferent to a visit from Be’er Sheva, the problem with this case is that, in effect, any European mayor can say that he cannot host Israeli fans, and UEFA, the football association and the club can do nothing about it.

Be’er Sheva approached the relevant bodies several times, including UEFA and the local authorities in the Netherlands, in an attempt to change the decision, without success.

The Israel Football Association also tried to deal with the situation and approached all the relevant parties. But UEFA’s regulations contain a clause under which, if the local authority presents data showing it lacks the ability to secure the visiting team’s fans, the home team may refuse to host away fans, though it is not obliged to prevent local fans from attending the stadium. In that sense, UEFA has no influence over the local authority.

The ban on Be’er Sheva fans traveling to Alkmaar is directly linked to three years of war and to the political and social atmosphere in the Netherlands, which is currently negative toward Israel. In that sense, the chain of events set off by Dutch domestic politics, which produced the ban on Be’er Sheva fans, does signal a change in the relationship between the Netherlands and its football, and Israel.

“There is a change, of course,” Cohen sums up. “But we also shouldn’t get carried away. It’s not that Jews and Israelis are unwelcome in the Netherlands. Jews are a very significant part of Dutch history, and that is something that can’t be erased.”

That is true, but it doesn’t contradict the fact that, right now, when it comes to football fans, Israel is seen as a pariah in European football. The default position of many countries is not to engage with the issue of Israeli fans at all and to avoid contact as far as possible. Whether the cause is the war in Gaza, the Amsterdam events of 2024, or domestic political matters in the Netherlands, England and Ireland, the result is the same. Fans of Israeli sports teams who arrive as one group, with Israeli flags and symbols, are at this moment persona non grata in too many places in European football.

This article was first published in Haaretz Hebrew edition.

After more than fourteen years without a significant crowd at a derby between Al Ahly and Zamalek, the two giants of Egyptian and Arab football, the Cairo derby was played on Sunday evening, in the sixth round of the Egyptian league, before tens of thousands of supporters from both camps.

Throughout the match, fans of both teams raised banners marking 53 years since the Yom Kippur War, known in Egypt as the “October War” (حرب اكتوبر).

“Eight thousand Ahlawis donated their blood in the October War” was the most prominent banner, displayed by Ultras Ahlawy, Al Ahly’s supporters’ group, recalling that thousands of club members donated blood during the war in a single day’s drive. “The October victory is always in our hearts,” read another banner, from Zamalek fans.

The banners commemorating what Egyptians regard as their “victory” in that war were not the only moment at which the two sets of fans acted together. Throughout the match, and with particular force in the 73rd minute, both crowds sang abusive songs and curses against Israel and Jews. “Right, left, *** the mother of the chosen people.”

Egyptian television avoided showing the banners in the live broadcast, and during the mass singing against Israel the sound appeared to be turned down, at least on the ON Sport network’s feed.

This rare moment of cooperation between two bitter rival crowds comes at a time when, in both Egypt and Israel, there are those trying to heat up the atmosphere, calling for mobilization and even for war, as if there had been no peace treaty between the two countries since 1979.

But why is this event so rare in the first place? To understand that, one has to understand the origins of this rivalry, the roots of Egyptian football, and one event that took place a decade and a half ago and changed this giant country forever.

No Milk Allowed

Egyptian football rests on an imaginary pyramid with three sides, each representing something different.

The first side of this pyramid is Al Ahly, Egypt’s superclub and its almost perennial champion. Al Ahly (“the National”, “my family” in Arabic) was founded in 1907 by idealistic students fed up with the yoke of the British colonialism that ruled the country at the time, under the slogan “an Egyptian club, for Egypt.” Although it became a trophy-devouring machine on the international level (by the club’s own records, Al Ahly has won 156 domestic and international titles in its history, more than any other club in the world), and is the most popular club in the country, in Africa and in the Arab world, over the years Al Ahly has preserved its political and social identity in Egypt. It is the club that symbolizes distrust of the authorities, the team of ordinary people and those struggling to get by, who suffer under the regime.

On the other side of the city sits the second side, Zamalek. Zamalek was founded a few years after Al Ahly, in 1911, as a team for foreigners in Egypt. Diplomats, journalists, colonial attachés and, generally, upper-class Egyptian bohemians gave the club, named after the city’s affluent district, its “elitist” identity. Zamalek was so closely tied to Cairo’s elite that for a period the team was called “King Farouk Club,” after the puppet ruler the British installed in Egypt when they granted the country independence in the 1920s. Zamalek is less successful than Al Ahly in terms of trophies, but the club has tens of millions of fans in Egypt, Africa and the Arab world.

Together the two make up one of the hottest rivalries in world football. It has everything: rich against poor, the people against the elite, red against white. In Egypt, nobody asks whether you like football. They ask, “Al Ahly or Zamalek?” Everyone must choose a side. The rivalry between the two is so bitter that some Al Ahly fans’ cafes do not serve milk during derby weeks, “because white is Zamalek’s color.” For years, the Cairo derby was considered one of the most explosive matches in the world, regularly featuring spectacular pyrotechnic displays, elaborate choreographies with opposing political messages, and no small amount of violence in the background.

What usually balances Egyptian football is the third side of the pyramid: the national team, المنتخب (al-Muntakhab). In contrast to the extremes produced by the two Cairo clubs, the national team is the unifying force. It does not matter what the political situation is or how high tensions run. When the national team plays, all Egyptians support it. The saying on everyone’s lips around the Pharaohs’ matches is “When the national team plays, everyone is in the stadium.” Indeed, the Egyptian national team is the brand that fills the Cairo International Stadium with close to ninety thousand spectators almost every time, and it is what unites the divided country around the flag, the anthem, the colors and the voices.

But to understand why this week’s derby was so extraordinary, one has to know the Port Said disaster and how it changed football and society in Egypt.

The Port Said Disaster

February 1, 2012. The day the ground shook beneath Egyptian football and opened its jaws.

A league match at Port Said Stadium between the local side Al Masry and Al Ahly of Cairo ended in a 3-1 win for the hosts, but what mattered was the critical context.

Egypt was then deep in the revolution brought about by the wave of mass protests known as the “Arab Spring.” President Hosni Mubarak had resigned in the face of enormous demonstrations against him, was tried, sentenced to life in prison and jailed. A military regime was installed after parliament was dissolved, but the people’s anger had not been forgotten. The protests continued, and in the background an election campaign was in full swing, with the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Sunni movement that advocates Islamic law and is anti-Western and anti-Israel, gaining strength in the polls with popularity that cut across classes and sectors. One of the active forces in the demonstrations in Tahrir Square was the Ultras Ahlawy, Al Ahly’s ultras group.

Together with other ultras, among them Zamalek’s Ultras White Knights (al-Fursan al-Abyad), football fans had become a kind of operational arm in the demonstrations and in the effort to replace the regime. On the other side of the pitch stood Al Masry (“the Egyptian”), a club whose fans had always been identified with the army, the police, the elites of the old regime and the Mubarak family. That is to say, beyond the sporting rivalry and the animosity between Port Said locals and Cairenes, Al Masry against Al Ahly in 2012 was in effect a direct meeting between “rebels” and “regime supporters,” under military rule in what amounted to a civil conflict.

At the final whistle, Al Masry fans stormed onto the pitch and charged toward the Al Ahly stand with whatever came to hand: sticks, stones, spikes, knives and tasers. The players scattered in hysteria. The Ahlawy ultras who tried to flee discovered, to their surprise, that the police were nowhere to be seen and that the exit doors from their stand were locked. The lights were dimmed, and what unfolded in the stand was, in effect, a killing field. The result: 72 fans dead, two police officers who also lost their lives, and more than 500 injured. Dozens of bodies reached the pitch. Some Al Ahly players tried to perform resuscitation on fans in the stand, by the goal and in the dressing room. It was utter chaos. The real madness is that the whole event was broadcast live on television, and it was clear that what was happening was far more than a violent deterioration of a football match.

The story has several versions. The framing account points to violence by Al Masry fans, identified as noted with the old regime, against Al Ahly fans identified with the revolution, the Arab Spring and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. The second and most widespread explanation claims direct involvement by the army and police, who planned the riot in coordination with Al Masry fans and even helped them as “undercover” agents, against the Ahlawy as revenge for their part in the protests that brought down the regime.

The third version, and the most speculative of the three, holds that the planners of the event came from within the Muslim Brotherhood itself, who sought to shock a public immersed in a “revolutionary” mindset, to undermine the image of Mubarak’s supporters, and to gain political power and public legitimacy to ensure that the old regime would not return, which is indeed what happened in the following election. Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, was elected about four months later, while playing up the failure of the police and the army in the disaster and even hinting at their active involvement as “representatives of the old regime.”

Since then, February 1 has become a day of popular mourning in Egypt, with huge memorial gatherings at which sharp distrust of the authorities is expressed. In the wake of the disaster, football in Egypt was halted for two years, and professional football as usual ceased to exist. After several failed attempts that cost more lives (including a disaster in which 22 Zamalek fans were killed), league matches in Egypt have been played behind closed doors since 2014, and cup finals and Super Cup matches were moved to Abu Dhabi and Doha so they could be held with fans of both teams. Only in the last three years have supporters begun returning to the stands for league and cup matches. At first it was a few thousand home fans, until this season. Ahead of 2026/27, the Sisi regime decided to introduce the Fan ID system used in Turkey, Greece and elsewhere.

On Sunday came the first Cairo derby with a massive presence of fans of both teams in a decade and a half. Almost fifty thousand supporters were divided between the two ends of the stadium. As fate would have it, the match was scheduled for the week in which Egypt marks the Yom Kippur War, on October 6, and in which the wider world marks October 7 and the war that followed. So it was that a rare display of unity between the two greatest rivals in Middle Eastern, Arab and African football appeared, something that has not happened since the Arab Spring protests.

From this, one can learn a great deal about Egyptian society. Its more than one hundred million people may be split in two over the question “Al Ahly or Zamalek?” but they are united in a consensus that cuts across classes, ages and football allegiances: the Yom Kippur War. This is not new. “The Sixth of October” is, as noted, a strong brand in Egypt, and there are bridges, squares, a museum and even a city named after that war. This fact, together with the people’s hatred of Israel, which is always there in the background and has reached new heights since October 7 and the war in Gaza, is one such peak. Another is a rare, unified front between the fans of the two bitterest rivals there are, who in everyday life see each other as enemies.

The article was first published in Haaretz.

Its effects now appear to be seeping into the geopolitical arena, and into relations between the United Arab Emirates and Britain.

As a reminder, last week an independent panel, appointed in 2020 at the Premier League’s request to examine City’s finances between 2013 and 2018, found the club guilty on 114 counts. The charges included falsifying records, deception, concealment and breaches of Premier League and Financial Fair Play rules, in connection with the injection of enormous sums, roughly £900 million, into the club’s coffers. According to the charges, the money came in part from the private pockets of the Al Nahyan family of Abu Dhabi, one of whose members, Sheikh Mansour, has owned the English club since 2008.

The legal side of the story is fascinating, but its interpretation is fairly clear. The independent panel’s ruling left no room for doubt. City are guilty and, as expected, have announced that they will appeal, which will push the resolution back by a considerable time.

During the period examined by the panel, City won three league titles, one FA Cup and three League Cups, which makes the panel’s decision especially dramatic in terms of both achievement and history. How should those triumphs be judged and remembered? And what of the legacy of this Manchester City?

“Manchester City should be punished, and severely,” said Canada head coach Jesse Marsch, who managed in the Premier League several years ago. “They should be relegated. And by the way, everybody knew this is what they were doing. Everybody knew.”

As the criticism piles up and City prepare to defend their name, the affair also appears to be opening a crack in relations between the UAE and Britain.

Investment in infrastructure and energy over a football club’s conviction?

It began small. Last Thursday, Etihad Airways, the UAE’s national airline, City’s sponsor and the company after which the stadium is named, announced that it intends to sue the Premier League for damaging the company’s good name. The matter of reputation is an interesting one, since countless people have seen their good names damaged in this saga, and it is far from certain that Etihad Airways is at the end of the queue.

Over the past weekend, Emirati officials passed messages through the British media, in what were described as “threats”. If the Premier League decides to harm the club, they warned, it could halt further Emirati investment in the United Kingdom.

It is important to understand the context. Economic ties between Britain and the UAE stretch back decades, to the discovery of oil in the Gulf state. Through them, large amounts of Emirati capital have flowed into Britain, leading to investment, job creation and long-term business relationships.

In 2021, the two countries established the UAE-UK Sovereign Investment Partnership, under which the Emirates pledged to invest £10 billion within five years in areas such as technology, infrastructure, healthcare and clean energy.

Since the partnership was established, the Emiratis have invested roughly £30 billion in Britain, mainly through Mubadala, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, which is chaired by Khaldoon Al Mubarak, City’s chairman and its most powerful figure. In 2013, Al Mubarak received a Commander of the Order of the British Empire from the Crown in recognition of his business contribution to investment in Britain and his work as head of Mubadala. Two days before the verdict against City’s finances was published, Al Mubarak reportedly met in London with Jonathan Reynolds, the UK’s Business Secretary, a sign of just how high up this story reaches.

While the British see Emirati investment in the country as separate from the ownership of the Manchester club, the view in the Gulf is different. Officials in Abu Dhabi close to Al Mubarak confirmed to BabaGol that Mubadala and the Al Nahyan family are watching how events unfold, and did not rule out a change in policy regarding Emirati investment in Britain.

“The family’s investment in the city of Manchester and in Britain as a whole goes far beyond football,” explains an Emirati source who worked at one of the football clubs owned by the Al Nahyan family as part of City Football Group, and who asked to remain anonymous. “Besides building a global football brand, they saved British banks from collapse (a reference to Barclays), created thousands of jobs for the city’s residents and rebuilt neighborhoods in east Manchester. From the Emirati perspective, this story feels like persecution. The league (the Premier League) needs to understand that there could be consequences if they take this all the way.”

Is this part of a bigger campaign?

Emirati ownership of Manchester City is a symbol of the huge Gulf investment in the United Kingdom, but the saga of City’s flawed financial conduct could develop into a much larger Pandora’s box.

If this is how things stand at City, then closer scrutiny is also warranted at Saudi-owned Newcastle United, and at every club owned by American billionaires. If it works in Britain, perhaps the French will also move to examine the books of Paris Saint-Germain. There, though, the challenge is greater, since the club is chaired by Nasser Al-Khelaifi, who is also president of the European Club Association and one of the most powerful people in world football.

Several scenarios could unfold, and the unequivocal, aggressive wording of the verdict makes it hard to see how City will emerge from this without punishment. Relegation, a massive points deduction and perhaps even the stripping of the titles they won are all on the table. The story is far from over, but we may be witnessing the first battle in a war over state ownership of clubs in European football. Does that mean the era will necessarily end? Not at all.

“I have a lot to say to you, so that you know how confident we are in our position,” wrote Khaldoon Al Mubarak, City’s Emirati chairman for the past 18 years, in a letter to supporters. “But the strict confidentiality of the legal process does not allow it at this time, and we want to respect the process.”

“The League’s entire case against us rests on one mistaken accusation,” said Ferran Soriano, City’s chief executive, in a video the club released to supporters.

“I want every City fan to know that I am here. More than ever, I am here. I will always stand behind my club… we will get through this together,” Pep Guardiola posted after the verdict was published.

Al Mubarak and Soriano can issue statements as they please, and Pep is entitled to express solidarity with the fans, but the damage to the reputation, legacy and story of everyone who took part in the club over the past decade and a half, and beyond, is enormous. That includes the legacy of the players, of Guardiola as a manager, of the club, and of the Premier League as a competitive league and sporting platform.

But with all due respect to the players, the staff and the Premier League, the ones who are really suffering now are Manchester City’s fans. These are the people who stood by the club in the lower leagues, when it was a likable side that was easy to love for its underdog status, yet one that bounced between divisions and lived on nostalgia for trophies won decades earlier. With disproportionate amounts of money, as noted, it became one of Europe’s giants. Now many of them realize that those achievements were reached by means that were not quite sporting, and that the enormous moments of joy they experienced were plastic to the point of forgery. That must surely be heartbreaking.

Perhaps this is the price paid by fans who welcome state ownership with open arms into a club they love. What is certain is that the saga of City’s conviction is only the first stage, the opening battle if you will, in what may become a larger war against state ownership in European football. It may also mark a new chapter in how Britain and the countries of Europe deal with Gulf investment in sport, and perhaps beyond.

The article was first published in Haaretz.

The Israeli side currently sits bottom of its group with just 2 points from four matches. They began their campaign with two defeats — 3-1 away to Austria and 3-0 against Ireland in Hungary — before improving slightly with two draws: 0-0 against Kosovo in Hungary and 1-1 against Ireland, played in Serbia.

Possible drop, but confidence in the coach

The Israeli national team's situation has grown more complicated following this run of results. One of the side's main goals was to secure one of the group's top two spots, which would confirm their place in Pot 2 for the Euro 2028 qualifying draw later this year. Finishing in the bottom two places would send them back to Pot 3, making their path to the tournament considerably harder.

The focus for the last two matches will be to avoid finishing last. If Israel fails to do so, they will have to play a relegation playoff in March 2027 — something they haven't faced since the competition's first edition in 2018-19.

Though the results have fallen short of expectations, FA officials have expressed confidence in manager Ran Ben Shimon, stating that his position remains stable for now. Still, poor results and weak performances in the final two matches could reopen the discussion about his future before the qualifying campaign begins.

Israel and Ireland's continuing clash

The main storyline of this break was the pair of matches between Israel and Ireland. After months of headlines, both teams were forced to face each other away from home: Israel played in Debrecen, their host city for this campaign, while Ireland made the controversial decision to move their home fixture to Bačka Topola, Serbia.

The drama began the day before the first match. Ireland's squad held extensive discussions over whether to protest or boycott the fixture. According to Irish reports, a vote was held beforehand, and the majority of the squad opted to play as usual. The only player to speak out publicly was third-choice goalkeeper Gavin Bazunu, who said playing against Israel went "against his principles."

The lengthy Irish team discussions delayed the pre-match press conference, adding further tension. Ireland manager Heimir Hallgrímsson was challenged over his comments before the match, and a similar scene unfolded at the Israeli press conference, where Ben Shimon and vice-captain Dor Peretz were pressed on the current situation in the Middle East.

The first match itself was one-sided, with Israel failing to impress. The Israeli defence endured a nightmare evening as Ireland raced into the lead. Troy Parrott, Adam Idah and Jack Moylan scored three goals inside 12 minutes, and the scoreline stayed at a comfortable 3-0 through to the final whistle.

The match was also marked by protest and controversy. During the Israeli anthem, the Irish starting XI lowered their heads while substitutes and staff turned their backs. At the coin toss, Irish captain Dara O'Shea refused to shake hands with his Israeli counterpart. Ireland's players also wore black armbands in memory of those killed in Gaza, and Moylan, the match's third goalscorer, celebrated by waving his armband in front of the Israeli supporters.

These incidents, together with allegations of racist behaviour made by Israeli players against their Irish opponents, dominated the build-up to the second match in Serbia. Ireland's press conference was abandoned after the manager declined to address the Israeli allegations, while Israel's press conference instead focused on chants from their own fans aimed at the Irish team, including chants in support of the IDF.

Allegations continued from both sides through the match itself, with Irish players and staff this time also claiming they had faced provocation. Israel again wore black armbands, this time to mark three years since the October 7th massacre.

Provocations aside, the second meeting was a far more balanced affair. Ireland took the lead in the 43rd minute when Troy Parrott converted a penalty won after a challenge by Dor Peretz. Peretz equalised in the 47th minute, celebrating by showing his black armband — just as Moylan had done in the first match.

Politics in the background

These two matches underlined the complicated position Israeli football has occupied over the past three years. During the break, two of Hapoel Be'er Sheva's upcoming Europa League opponents made their own announcements: AZ Alkmaar confirmed it would not allow away fans to travel to the Netherlands, while Union Saint-Gilloise opted to play its home fixture in Germany behind closed doors.

On the Irish side, journalists have called for Israel to be suspended from competition, and protests took place in Ireland ahead of the home game against Austria. Others took a more measured view, expressing hope that UEFA might treat fixtures between Israeli and Irish sides as prohibited — in the way matches between Serbia and Kosovo are. It's worth noting, however, that such a decision may be unworkable, since the two countries still maintain diplomatic relations.

In the next international window, Israel will look to leave the political controversy behind and focus on football. Given their current position, avoiding relegation to League C and holding onto their place in the tier they've occupied in recent years could prove crucial to their future.

Relegated back to League B in the last edition, Israel have been drawn into Group B3 alongside Austria, Ireland, and Kosovo. Last week UEFA approved a format change that scraps automatic relegation from League B to League C, meaning the team's main target is now simply a top-three finish to secure their place in League B for the next edition. Whoever finishes bottom of the group will face a relegation playoff in March 2027.

Despite a tough draw, Israel still harbor hopes of topping the group. They managed it four years ago, a run that delivered promotion to League A and a place in the Euro 2024 playoffs. A first-place finish this time would likely be enough to secure a third consecutive Euro playoff appearance.

No home, and a packed schedule

Israel are once again facing a campaign played entirely away from home. Since October 2023, the national team has been unable to play on home soil because of the ongoing conflict, and their "home" games will instead be staged at the Nagyerdei Stadion in Debrecen, Hungary — the same venue used during the previous Nations League campaign and throughout the 2026 World Cup qualifiers.

For most of the squad, this will be their first experience of a four-match international break. Israel, however, have been here before: after the war began in 2023, two rescheduled fixtures meant the team played four games in under two weeks.

The campcampaign opens with an away trip to Austria in Linz, followed by a match in Hungary against Kosovo. The break then closes with the double-header drawing the most attention — the two games against Ireland.

Politics storm the pitch

The fixtures against Ireland have made headlines ever since the Nations League draw back in February. Ireland has been one of the most vocal European countries in its diplomatic stance against Israel's conduct in the Gaza Strip, and was — alongside Spain and Slovenia — among the first in Europe to recognize the State of Palestine, in May 2024.

In the months since the draw, Irish politicians and activists repeatedly called for a boycott of the fixtures, some urging that Israel be suspended altogether, in the same manner as Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.

The Gardaí, Ireland's police force, also weighed in on hosting the match in Dublin. Those seeking a middle ground proposed barring Israeli fans from traveling to Ireland altogether — echoing the approach West Midlands Police took a year earlier for the Aston Villa–Maccabi Tel Aviv fixture.

In the end, the Irish FA decided to relocate the match to Bačka Topola, Serbia, and to play it behind closed doors — a decision that drew criticism from all sides. Some argued the fixture should have gone ahead as planned in Dublin, a position backed by former Ireland captain Kenny Cunningham, while others continued to demand nothing short of a full boycott.

Irish broadcaster RTÉ has confirmed it will air both matches against Israel, honoring its obligations as rights holder — though it has opted to provide no commentator and no dedicated coverage.

Protests against Israel in Ireland are nothing new, nor are they solely a product of the current war. Demonstrations also took place ahead of the sides' previous meeting in Dublin in 2005, before the 2022 U-21 fixture, and even ahead of Bnei Yehuda's Europa League qualifier away to Shamrock Rovers in 2010.

Refusing to host Israel has likewise become something of a pattern in recent years. Belgium moved its previous Nations League home fixture against Israel to Hungary, while Belgium, Scotland, and Luxembourg all relocated their Women's World Cup qualifiers against Israel to Hungary as well. A year earlier, Scotland's women's team hosted Israel in Glasgow — but behind closed doors.

Ireland's coach speaks his mind

The figure most openly outspoken on the matches is Ireland manager Heimir Hallgrímsson, the Icelandic head coach. In the days leading up to the fixture, he said the team wasn't playing with Israel but against it: "When people know that these games are going to be played, we'll get the people that are ready to support us in the games. And I've said before, we're not playing with genocide, we're playing against genocide."

The Israeli FA responded in kind. "We have contributed to the world and humanity in countless fields, earning an impressive number of Nobel Prizes along the way," the federation said in an official statement. "Unfortunately, we have not yet found a cure for stupidity, ignorance, and hypocrisy displayed by the Ireland team coach. We're not playing with ignorance, hypocrisy, and stupidity. We're playing against the coach who embodies them."

The exchange drew political attention too. Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin backed Hallgrímsson's characterization of Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide, calling the Israeli FA's remarks "unacceptable" and saying they should be withdrawn.

None of this is unprecedented. Similar tensions defined both World Cup qualifiers between Israel and Norway, during which the Norwegian FA donated match-day revenue from the Oslo fixture to Gaza. Norwegian FA president Lise Klaveness was among those who pushed UEFA to suspend Israel altogether — though it's worth noting the gap between public statements and private conduct: Klaveness and Israeli FA chairman Moshe Zuares reportedly backed each other's campaigns for seats on the UEFA Executive Committee.

For Israel, the hope is that these matches will ultimately be about football alone. The team knows that politics and the war will loom larger over this campaign than usual — and their task will be to answer it the only way they can: with results on the pitch.

The Israeli champions are facing a series of challenges this season. First of all, the tough competition. According to several simulation websites, Hapoel Be'er Sheva will have one of the most difficult schedules. Among their next opponents, they will play against Juventus, AZ, Union Saint-Gilloise, Celta Vigo and Bournemouth.

Moreover, the new format makes it a bit harder for the Israeli teams. In the last two seasons, Maccabi Tel Aviv was the only Israeli team to reach the league stage, as they won only 2 out of 16 matches. Last season they even finished in last place with a single point.

For Hapoel Be'er Sheva, the Europa League brings old and sweet memories. This week they marked 10 years since their Europa League group stage debut. In their first-ever match in this stage, the Israelis shocked Inter 2-0 in an away match at San Siro. Later they defeated them once again, and two more draws against Southampton made them reach the knockout stage.

Besides this challenge, Hapoel Be'er Sheva is facing a mental challenge, as they are reaching the Europa League after a hugely disappointing defeat against Sabah in the Champions League playoffs. In the second leg in Azerbaijan, Hapoel Be'er Sheva were 17 seconds away from qualifying, but a shocking goal by the hosts eventually ended with a defeat in extra time. "You mentioned the Inter game, but it was also after a defeat in the Champions League against Celtic," said captain Miguel Vitor, who was part of the club both now and then. "We have no choice but to stand up and move on," added manager Ran Kozuch in the press conference.

Maybe the main challenge that Hapoel Be'er Sheva will face this season is the fact that they are not playing at home. Since October 2023, no Israeli team has hosted on home soil. Hapoel Be'er Sheva decided to make Rapid-Giulești Stadium in Bucharest their home venue for the campaign. It's not only the lack of home atmosphere, as approximately a thousand fans travelled to the match. The Israelis are facing double the number of flights to make their campaign successful.

Back to the match on Wednesday, Hapoel Be'er Sheva can be proud of their opening match performance. "I think we had a great match and we need to improve our decision making," said Ran Kozuch in the press conference after the match. "We've been dominant against a decent European side, and we need to take that. We need to take the confidence and the belief in our ability to play at these levels."

After the international break, Hapoel Be'er Sheva will play two consecutive away matches in the Europa League against AZ and Union Saint-Gilloise.

THE FIRST TEL AVIV DERBY FOR 2026/27

The Tel Aviv derby is the biggest game Israeli football has to offer nowadays in terms of rivalry, atmosphere, and sporting competition.

Historically, this rivalry has everything: ideological differences, local and continental prestige, a battle for dominance, and a true fight for titles and championships.

The roots of the rivalry go back even before the days of the British Mandate in Palestine. Maccabi represented the upper-middle class of the Jewish population, with strong connections to the international Maccabi movement, while Hapoel was the club of the Histadrut — the Hebrew labor movement. The two clubs fought for the city's prominence, but also for political influence, as they tried to establish more and more Hapoel and Maccabi clubs across the country.

Both clubs also won the Asian Champions League in its early years, with Hapoel winning the inaugural tournament in 1967, while Maccabi won the 1969 edition and the 1971 one — the latter after Iraq's Al-Shorta refused to play against an Israeli opponent. In the years that followed, more and more Middle Eastern and West Asian teams would refuse to play Israeli opponents, a trend that would eventually push Israel out of the Asian football confederation.

The beginning of the millennium belonged to Hapoel. They won the double in 1999/00 and again in 2009/10. At the same time, Maccabi was enduring one of the worst eras in its history, save for a championship in 2003/04 and a Champions League campaign the following season.

But everything changed when Maccabi was bought by Mitch Goldhar, a Canadian billionaire, who hired Jordi Cruyff as technical director — a move that transformed Maccabi and Israeli football dramatically. Maccabi went on to a three-peat, winning three championship titles with tremendous dominance, and later added two more titles under coach Vladimir Ivic.

These years were difficult for Hapoel. They were relegated twice and hadn't won a derby in 14 years. That streak came to an end last season, when Hapoel won dramatically 2-1 after coming from behind in the final minutes.

Beyond the results, this fixture has always delivered spectacular choreographies, pyro shows, and atmosphere. In recent years, it has been interrupted several times and even abandoned once, after a fan stormed the pitch and fought with a player. This game was heavily influenced by a heavy police presence in Jaffa in the hours before kick-off.

Match Report

As is tradition, the derby's opening moments were interrupted by pyrotechnics, and this time was no different. Both sets of fans — Ultras Hapoel and the Maccabi Fanatics — set off heavy pyrotechnics that delayed the start of play. 28,846 fans almost filled the Bloomfield stadium terraces.

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After exactly eight minutes, Maccabi Tel Aviv broke the deadlock through an impressive diving header from captain Dor Peretz.

Hapoel Tel Aviv equalised in the 32nd minute with a sublime goal from Stav Turiel, who finished off a counterattack with a shot from outside the box into the left side of the goal — a beautiful equaliser that lifted the atmosphere further.

It took Maccabi less than three minutes to restore their lead. A counterattack found Ester Sokler in the box, who squared the ball to Osher Davida — an ex-Hapoel player — who fired it into the top corner to make it 2-1 to the Yellows.

After scoring, Davida celebrated in front of Gate Five, home to Hapoel's most fervent supporters, with a shooting gesture. The celebration struck a nerve with the Reds, as the gesture is infamously associated with Eran Zahavi, the former Hapoel star who went on to retire as a Maccabi legend.

Davida's celebration sparked chaos on the pitch between players from both sides, with Turiel picking up a yellow card for pushing him.

In the 44th minute, Maccabi came close to a third. A superb counterattack found Davida again in the box; he flicked the ball on with his head to beat the Hapoel defence, and Sokler — his provider for the second goal — converted. The goal was ruled out by VAR for offside.

Deep into first-half stoppage time, Turiel picked up a second yellow card and was sent off, leaving Hapoel with ten men for the remainder of the match. It had been a hectic and thrilling first half.

The second half was comparatively quiet until the 88th minute, when a pair of substitutes changed the picture. Elad Madmon drove with the ball down the line, beat two Hapoel defenders, and squared it for Hisham Layous, who slotted home the third for the Yellows.

Moments before the final whistle, Maccabi broke away once more, and Madmon struck the fourth from inside the box, sealing a 4-1 rout for the Maccabees.

"Four goals, a wonderful performance — especially at home in front of our fans, who pushed us from start to finish," said Maccabi coach Kenny Miller after the match. "I'm very happy. There were a few moments where we dropped back. There were so many good spells of possession in the second half; it was frustrating not to score, but we got it done."

Osher Davida added: "It's the best feeling in the world; we're happy. The 'pew-pew' gesture? That's just what I've been doing lately — it's nothing special, and it's not specific to this match. I can understand why they'd call it a provocation. Fair enough."

"The coach told us all week to stick to the game plan, no matter what happened. Because we saw it through to the end, we managed to score two more goals. After the first goal, we seized the momentum and pushed forward. I believe we'll keep winning, game after game."

From the losing side, coach Elyaniv Barda addressed the reasons for the defeat: "You can't overlook Turiel's sending-off; it had a critical impact on the match and on our style of play," Barda said after the game. "Even though we conceded, we started well — the first half-hour was good. Maccabi scored from their first two chances, capitalising on our mistakes. We were doing just fine, but then the 2-1 goal and the red card completely changed the complexion of the match."

The Tel Aviv derby is probably the greatest city derby Israeli football has to offer in terms of history, rivalry, passion, and atmosphere. The first edition of 2026/27 was coloured entirely in yellow and blue on Monday night.

This coming weekend, for the first time since October 7, 2023, Palestinian club football will be played again — in a unique and ambitious competition whose format is still not entirely clear even to those running it.

Last month, the Palestinian Football Association unveiled the "Cup of the 1,000 Martyrs" at a press conference: a tournament featuring 226 clubs, 140 of them from the West Bank, 44 from Gaza, and another 36 arriving from Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. The competition is set to run through several rounds, with only the top four finishers in each region advancing to a second, knockout-format stage. It has not yet been announced how the champions and runners-up from the different regions will eventually face one another. One can safely assume that, at some point, calls will emerge for a team from Gaza to travel to the West Bank, or vice versa, and for clubs to link up with Lebanon as well — all things that happened routinely in the decade before October 7, in the world that existed before the war.

The regular domestic leagues, meanwhile, will not return until the 2027/28 season at the earliest, and only if the security situation allows, per Rajoub’s declarations in August, 2026.

The opening whistle this coming Friday will sound simultaneously in three places: in the West Bank, with a match between Jabal Mukaber and Shabab Al-Khalil of Hebron; in Gaza, with the Rafah derby between Shabab Rafah and Khadamat Rafah; and in southern Lebanon, with a match between Al-Ansar (not the well-known original club of that name) and Al-Nahda.

The very fact that the tournament is being staged across these three regions carries a message of its own — one of "unifying the arenas" that the Palestinian Football Association, headed by Jibril Rajoub, clearly wants to send to the wider world.

It will be fascinating to see how much of this project — the first of its kind since the war began — actually manages to run its course as planned.

Plenty of questions have followed the biggest star in the Middle East and his choice of this relatively obscure Turkish club. So here is the full picture.

After nine years of titles, personal records, and hundreds of goals and assists, Mohamed Salah left Liverpool this summer as a free agent — and the rumours and offers came thick and fast. Two MLS clubs, a Saudi Pro League side, an Italian club, and the team considered the most serious contender: Beşiktaş of Turkey. But Beşiktaş struggled to match Salah's wage demands, and negotiations with his agent, Ramy Abbas Issa, broke down over commission. The deal collapsed.

That opened the door for Trabzonspor — Turkey's fourth club, or, if you like, the Hapoel Be'er Sheva of the Turkish top flight: a side that does not come from Istanbul and is not part of the traditional big three of Galatasaray, Fenerbahçe, or Beşiktaş, but from Trabzon. A city on the shores of the Black Sea, deep in Anatolia, a peripheral corner of Turkey that has almost always lived in the shadow of Istanbul's metropolitan dominance — and even of the major cities of Ankara and Izmir. They are, in every sense, the "others" of Turkish football, and local Trabzon identity is something they wear with enormous pride.

And those "others" put a serious offer on the table: €17 million per season for two years, with potential bonuses taking it to €19 million, and when shirt sales and commercial deals are factored in, Salah stands to earn over €40 million in total.

Several factors made Trabzonspor the right fit. Salah was keen to remain in European football and in European competition — Trabzonspor play in the UEFA Europa League. He also needed his agent's commission to be right, his salary to be as close as possible to what he earned at Liverpool, and he was genuinely pleased that the environment in Trabzon and Turkey would suit his family — both culturally and religiously.

There is also something else: Salah has always loved being the outsider, the underdog who arrives somewhere and rewrites the story.

When you look at all of those elements together, Trabzonspor ticked every single box.

And why was Salah wearing the number 61 in the photo Trabzonspor published?

61 is Trabzon's telephone dialling code — and it has become a badge of fierce local pride, a kind of Trabzon identity symbol that says: "We are different, we are outsiders, we are underdogs — and we love it." A little like the 08 of Be'er Sheva, only on the Black Sea.

But not to worry — 61 was just for the announcement. During the season, in both the Turkish league and in Europe, Salah will wear the number 10, just as he does for the Egyptian national team.

Thousands upon thousands—some singing, others simply smiling and patiently waiting for their turn to board the train.

The 2026 World Cup Final was, above all else, a home game for Argentina because of its fans.

"I sold both my car and my wife's car just to buy a ticket," Juan, who traveled from Rosario, told BabaGol.

From 9 a.m. onward, Penn Station in Manhattan filled with Argentina supporters, each carrying a different story. Some had flown from Argentina, others were Argentines living in the United States, and many had simply caught the Albiceleste fever.

Just as happened throughout this World Cup in Israel, the same phenomenon could be seen around the globe: fans from every continent wearing Argentina shirts with the number 10 and "Messi" on the back.

Football was not the only topic occupying Penn Station.

"Red card for Donald Trump! Come get your red card for Donald Trump!" shouted Edna, an activist protesting the renewed war, as she attempted to hand out symbolic red cards to supporters. Very few stopped to take one. Their focus was elsewhere.

The stadium in New Jersey—ironically named MetLife Stadium—sits well outside the city, requiring train transfers for most visitors. Arriving there feels more like reaching a spacecraft launch site than one of the world's biggest sporting events. Detached from the pulse of New York City, even its official tournament name, "New York New Jersey Stadium," feels oddly disconnected.

That isolation seemed to influence both the atmosphere and the football itself.

The spotlight naturally fell on Lionel Messi and Lamine Yamal.

Messi struggled to find space or receive meaningful service. Yamal looked dangerous early, nearly scoring in the opening minutes, but gradually faded from the match.

Argentina never truly settled during the first half, which ended scoreless.

Ironically, after a World Cup filled with drama and unforgettable moments, the Final itself became a disappointing football match.

That feeling was reinforced by a halftime show featuring Madonna, Justin Bieber, and Shakira, which lasted nearly 28 minutes. Watching artists of that caliber is entertaining, but in the middle of a World Cup Final it felt out of place, overly commercial, and at times even cringeworthy.

When play resumed, it became clear that if Argentina had been poor before halftime, they were virtually absent after the break.

Every tactical adjustment made by Lionel Scaloni failed to change the flow of the match.

Then came the turning point.

Just moments after Argentina produced arguably its best attacking move, Enzo Fernández—already booked earlier in the second half—lunged into a reckless challenge, received a second yellow card, and was sent off, leaving Argentina with ten men.

Deep into stoppage time, Lamine Yamal had a chance to win it from a free kick, but sent his effort well over the crossbar.

Extra time followed the same pattern.

Argentina looked completely out of ideas. Even the desperate encouragement from tens of thousands of supporters failed to generate the momentum that had carried the team throughout the tournament.

In every previous Argentina match, there had been a moment when the crowd lifted the players and pushed them toward victory.

This time, that moment never came.

In the 106th minute, Spain struck.

A calm, clinical counterattack—exactly the kind Spain has perfected—ended with substitute Ferran Torres finishing after another substitute, Nico Williams, brilliantly set him up.

The stadium fell silent.

The public announcer called out the scorer's name and the updated scoreline, but what everyone truly noticed was the overwhelming silence that had engulfed the arena.

Tens of thousands of Argentina supporters knew the truth.

After such a flat performance, and after surviving so many difficult moments through individual brilliance earlier in the tournament, overturning the deficit now seemed impossible.

The goal itself was a reminder of football's enduring truth: disciplined, organized, and resilient teams can overcome emotion, passion, national identity—and even the greatest player in history.

Messi's tears at the final whistle moved many inside the stadium.

They understood they were likely witnessing the farewell of the man who had given Argentina hope for two decades.

Spain are thoroughly deserving world champions.

They were the tournament's best team from start to finish.

Yet their coronation and trophy presentation became memorable for a different reason.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who presented the trophy, lingered on the podium long after the ceremony should have belonged to Spain's players, while FIFA President Gianni Infantino appeared to urge him repeatedly to step aside.

Trump, who throughout the tournament appeared eager to use the World Cup for political gain—including his controversial intervention surrounding Folarin Balogun's red card—seemed determined to remain the center of attention.

The loud boos that greeted him when he appeared on the pitch suggested that, despite the extraordinary ticket prices that kept many supporters away, the American president's popularity remains limited, and the World Cup did little to improve it.

The 2026 World Cup—an enormous tournament and perhaps the biggest global cultural event ever staged—came to an end with a Final that never quite lived up to its billing.

But it crowned an outstanding Spanish team and delivered one final reminder that, in football, compelling stories are not enough.

You have to win matches, and above all, you have to keep the ball out of your own net.

But as you approach 45th Street, you begin to hear a familiar melody.

"For the Malvinas, for Diego, and for Leo's last one."

The song blasted from the speakers of motorized rickshaws racing through the autumn evening in Midtown Manhattan.

The second clue—and the one impossible to miss—was the thousands of people wearing every imaginable Argentina shirt, filling Seventh and Eighth Avenues from 33rd Street northward.

If there is one fan base capable of changing Manhattan's rhythm, it is Argentina's. And for one Saturday, Times Square became Argentina.

Tens of thousands poured into Midtown from the early morning, celebrating regardless of the weather. Haze gave way to relentless rain by late morning, yet nobody cared that the official march was not even scheduled to begin until 5:00 p.m.

The crowds became almost unbearable. At one point, the NYPD deployed additional officers and barriers along Seventh Avenue. The supporters barely noticed.

"We're here for our country, and we're here for Leo Messi," said Alejandro, an Argentina supporter living in New York.

"This could be his last tournament. Maybe even his final match for Argentina. I came today, and I'll be here tomorrow, mainly to thank him."

The last time Lionel Messi played at the New Jersey stadium that will host the World Cup Final was exactly ten years ago.

It was the Copa América Centenario Final, commemorating the 100th anniversary of South America's premier international tournament.

That night, Argentina and Chile went to a penalty shootout. Messi blasted his penalty over the crossbar, Chile lifted the trophy, and afterward Messi stunned the football world by announcing his retirement from international football, after once again being blamed by sections of the Argentine media and even having his national identity questioned.

Ten years later, everything has changed.

"Today, Messi is the greatest symbol of being Argentine," says Horacio, who traveled from Córdoba to New York.

"He's like asado. Like Fernet and cola. Like Diego. Maybe even bigger than all of them combined. Messi is Argentina. We're crazy about him."

After winning the Copa América in 2021 and the World Cup in 2022, Messi has become Argentina's greatest ambassador to the world.

"I just want to tell him that I love him. What he has done in this tournament is the reason you see New York like this today. We've never experienced anything like it. This is because of Messi. It's because of him."

The weather became part of the spectacle.

From midday onward, heavy rain drenched the supporters, prompting thousands to open umbrellas simultaneously, creating a breathtaking scene across Midtown.

The downpour was so intense that Spain canceled its final training session, while Argentina trained as scheduled.

"In Argentina, the weather doesn't matter," Alejandro said.

"Football is played in every condition—especially when it's for the national team. The players keep training because they know the fans are giving everything now, and they'll give everything again in the Final."

And indeed, the 2026 World Cup Final promises to feel like a home match for Argentina, with an overwhelming presence of sky-blue-and-white supporters inside the stadium.

For them, this is a defining moment for a nation that has endured years of economic and political hardship.

Above all, it is a moment for their hero—their footballing messiah—Lionel Messi, whom they simply want to thank.

The stage could hardly be more fitting: the European champions against the South American champions. The tournament's two best teams.

Messi against Lamine Yamal—the same child Messi famously bathed during a UNICEF photoshoot 19 years ago, in one of football's most remarkable stories.

Both emerged from Barcelona's famed La Masia academy. Both became stars wearing the iconic No. 19 and No. 10 shirts at Camp Nou.

While Messi remains the undisputed face of Argentina, Yamal represents a new Spain—more diverse, multicultural, shaped by immigration, and looking toward the future.

For Yamal, this is the first World Cup Final of his career after a tournament that, by his extraordinary standards, has not been his finest.

For Messi, who has already won every major trophy in football—and secured eternal love from the Argentine people—there is nothing left to prove.

"Messi doesn't have to prove anything to us," Horacio says as the celebrations continue across Manhattan.

"We already know he's the greatest of all time. That's why there's no pressure on him in the Final."

He's right.

After lifting the World Cup in 2022, and with eight goals and four assists in this tournament, Messi has nothing left to prove. If anything, borrowing a famous line from former Israeli striker Alon Mizrahi, Messi has nothing left to prove—and somehow he keeps proving it again, every single match.

His enormous portrait waving proudly above Times Square, alongside songs that mention him, Diego Maradona, and even God, perfectly captures Argentina's spirit ahead of the biggest match of them all.

Indeed, the semi-final between France and Spain in Arlington, Dallas, was a special, high-quality, and thoroughly enjoyable occasion. But it is the French — who arrived full of optimism — who will want to forget it as quickly as possible.

For the first time ever, the French national team played a match on July 14th — Bastille Day, the French national holiday. That is no small thing. "It is very special to play such a big match on the day of our Revolution, and it only adds to the national celebration," Jérôme, one of the few hundred French supporters who made the trip to Texas to back the side in their third consecutive World Cup semi-final, told BabaGol. "But it won't be worth anything if we don't do the job. Tomorrow, the celebrations will pause for the match. Beating Spain is all that matters."

While the French national holiday dominated the headlines, Spain also had a national moment of their own — albeit a smaller one, and the day before the match. The birthday of the player who, in the summer of 2024 during the Euros, became the new face of Spain through football: Lamine Yamal.

Yamal, who celebrated his 17th birthday on the eve of that Euro final, and marked his 18th with an extravagant party that drew widespread criticism, kept things low-key this time around and focused on preparing for the big game. "None of you expect me to be good tomorrow," he said at the press conference, "but maybe that's exactly why I'll surprise you."

"Lamine is celebrating his birthday and I hope his teammates give him the gift of a place in the final — and then a World Cup win," Juan from Seville, who had followed Spain from the knockout stages onwards, told BabaGol. Yamal's tournament had been solid rather than spectacular by his own extraordinary standards. "He's still so young, and so gifted — he has so much more to give Spain."

At the pre-match press conferences, both Spain manager Luis de la Fuente and Didier Deschamps — who dreamed of becoming the first man to win the World Cup as both player and manager twice over — reached for the language of war. On matchday itself, it was France who appeared to carry the greater confidence.

They had the larger support outside the stadium in Dallas, and it was also announced that before kick-off there would be a minute's silence to mark the tenth anniversary of the victims of the Nice terrorist attack in 2016, when a Tunisian-born truck driver living in France killed 86 people. That tribute seemed only to add to the heavy national weight already pressing down on the French players on July 14th — because when the match began, they simply did not show up.

More than seventy thousand spectators in a somewhat subdued atmosphere watched Lamine Yamal ghost in behind Luca Digne and win a penalty in what had actually been a decent opening spell for France.

The penalty was coolly converted by Mikel Oyarzabal — the quiet sensation of Spain's tournament — giving Spain an early lead that effectively set the tone for an easy afternoon. Oyarzabal has scored five goals at this World Cup. He scored six more in qualifying, and three in the pre-tournament friendlies. That is 14 goals in his last 14 appearances for the national team, and 30 in total for Spain. The Real Sociedad forward has established himself at this tournament as a genuine monster — a quiet one, but a monster nonetheless, and one who takes penalties with exceptional composure.

From that point on, it was Spain's game entirely. The second goal arrived in the second half, after a sublime one-two between Pedro Porro and Dani Olmo, finished by the defender himself, who produced a heavenly performance and was named man of the match.

In the 86th minute, French supporters unfurled a large Tricolore in memory of the 86 victims of the Nice attack. A decade has passed since that sorrowful Bastille Day, and though Kylian Mbappé and his teammates desperately wanted to bring joy to the nation of liberty, fraternity, and equality on its national day, it simply did not happen. France looked lost against Rodri, Lamine, and company, and the Spanish olé chants had already started in the stands by the 70th minute. In truth, it would not be an exaggeration to write that Spain knocked France out rather than merely beating them 2-0 — because this was a sporting knockout that the scoreline barely captured.

"In a World Cup semi-final you need to be at your peak, and we simply weren't there today," summarised outgoing France manager Deschamps. A new era is about to begin in France, with Zinedine Zidane — who has an agreement in place to take over and is only awaiting formal confirmation — set to lead the side. For years, France benefited from the stability Deschamps brought, much of it rooted in the character he had shown as captain during his playing days. Now, Mbappé, Ousmane Dembélé, Michael Olise, and their teammates can look forward to receiving a little of the star quality and daring that Zidane instils. Perhaps enough to celebrate a 14th of July with a European Championship in two years' time — and to go again for the World Cup in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco in 2030.

And yet, the atmosphere inside and outside the stadium ahead of the Norway–England quarter-final was almost perfect. Both sets of supporters were in superb spirits — songs, jokes, warm exchanges. A wonderfully positive matchday feel that blended fan culture, ancient history, and a meeting between genuine football giants.

Norway are the dark horses of this World Cup. They navigated a group of death alongside France, Senegal, and Iraq to reach the quarter-finals for the first time in their history.

The Norwegians are enjoying a rare golden generation of talented players performing at the very top of European football: Martin Ødegaard, Alexander Sørloth, and of course Erling Haaland, Manchester City's striker who has been on fire at this tournament with seven goals — including three braces. Haaland was born in England while his father, Alfie Inge, was playing for Leeds United, and in fact spent the first four years of his life as English as they come. In theory, he could have represented the Three Lions. But he broke through at such a young age in Norwegian youth football that the question became irrelevant very early in the career of this force of nature.

Alongside what happens on the pitch, Norway's supporters are providing the standout phenomenon of the tournament. Their rowing celebration — known as the Ro — has become a viral sensation, adopted by Norwegians and non-Norwegians alike, fans and players from across the world.

"The rowing movement is a nod to our Viking ancestors, who would row in unison during their voyages in search of food and new lands, calling out to motivate one another at sea and ahead of battle," Asper Bergen, a Norwegian fan gathered in the supporters' area outside Hard Rock Stadium, explained to BabaGol.

But ahead of the match against England, the rowing carries a very different set of connotations. For the English, that movement — together with the battle cry of Ro! — evokes the Norse Viking raids of the late eighth century, when longships descended on the British coastline and struck terror into the local population.

English history makes much of the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066 — from which Chelsea's famous stadium takes its name — the first engagement in which British warriors repelled a Viking assault.

In that sense, the Norwegian fans' Ro at the 2026 World Cup carries within it a hint of menace. "Historically, we don't love that," admits Scott, an English supporter who made the trip to Miami. "But it only motivates us. We're a much better team, and we'll win."

The problem for Scott and England's fans is that historically, when these two sides have met, it is Norway who have tended to come out on top. The last time England and Norway met in a competitive fixture was in the 1994 World Cup qualifiers, when Norway won 2-0 and ultimately qualified for that tournament in the United States. That defeat was one of the reasons England missed out on the competition entirely and stayed home.

When the match got underway — following a minute's silence in memory of Jayden Adams, the South Africa international found dead in circumstances suspected to be suicide, which brought the whole occasion into proper perspective — the sporting atmosphere resumed.

Norway's fans went back to their rowing and whistling at Jude Bellingham, while England's supporters chanted "England! England!" each time it seemed the pints they had been sinking since morning were finally catching up with them.

The first half began at a sluggish pace in the humidity, but Norway played well — until the 36th minute, when Andreas Schjelderup received the ball on the left and drilled a left-footed strike to the far corner. The ball kissed the post and flew in. An iconic goal that stunned the stadium and sent a message: the Vikings are here to make history, and to enjoy every moment of it.

England's response was swift. In first-half stoppage time, Jude Bellingham finished a counter-attack in stunning fashion to make it 1-1. Harry Kane even had a goal disallowed for offside. The pace, the atmosphere, the football — by this point, everyone inside the stadium and watching at home knew: we are witnessing a genuine World Cup classic.

The second half opened with another Norwegian goal ruled out, this time for a foul by Haaland on England centre-back John Stones. And yet, for almost an entire half, England — bar one simple through ball — were barely present. "Whatever the result, for us this is a historic and incredible match," Auga, a Norwegian fan, told BabaGol at the end of the ninety minutes as the game went into extra time. He was right. Such dominance from Norway in their very first quarter-final appearance, against a Premier League-stacked England side, was a genuinely impressive feat.

But in extra time, it began to unravel — or rather, to melt. The humidity, the heat, and the very intensity Norway had thrown into the match simply took their legs. Bellingham, another superstar having a tournament to remember, seized on it to put England ahead at 2-1 early in extra time — his sixth goal of the tournament — and from there it was largely England's game until the final whistle, the victory, and a ticket to the semi-finals.

"We were lucky today," England's German manager Thomas Tuchel told the media. "We made a lot of technical and tactical errors, and our performance was disjointed. That has nothing to do with mentality. We need to play better."

"We weren't good, we paid mortgage-level prices for our tickets — but we've got Jude Bellingham, and it's coming home!" a pair of English supporters who had made the journey from London told BabaGol on their way out of the stadium.

Tuchel is right, of course — but so is that happy pair. Because when England win a match like this, one in which they were outplayed by Norway for most of it, and still find their voices at the end to sing Wonderwall in perfect unison with the crowd, then perhaps it's time to acknowledge that this England side has what it takes — to overcome the fear of the Vikings, to survive an off day, and to truly bring football home.

"God is on my side and He is the best one to set things right. He wasted the effort of an entire nation… And yes, Mabrook — the cup has been handed to Argentina as a gift here."

Zizo's words capture the mood among most Egypt players and supporters after the extraordinary round-of-sixteen tie against Argentina, which ended in a 3-2 win for the reigning champions following a breathless, dramatic comeback from Lionel Messi and his teammates in the final fifteen minutes.

As far as Egypt are concerned, an injustice was done — and conspiracy theories are already spreading across social media. The disallowed Egyptian goal, combined with the fouls committed against Hamdi Fathi and Salah in the build-up to Argentina's third, are at the centre of the grievances. "All I can say is that Fathi's shirt was torn, and he didn't tear it himself," said Mustafa "Ofa" Shobeir, the current Egypt goalkeeper, who delivered a masterclass between the posts — including a penalty save against Messi in the first half.

"I have no intention of watching even one more minute of this World Cup," said Egypt manager Hossam Hassan after the final whistle. Hassan, Egypt's all-time record goalscorer as a player, and the man who had dedicated the penalty shootout victory over Australia in the previous round to the Palestinian people, ended this match in deep frustration. "I'll say everything without any regard for the consequences. This match was fixed. The whole world saw it. If Argentina wants to win this badly, and that's how it works, why invite any other teams at all?"

Hassan, too, reached for the Arabic expression: "Hasbiya Allah wa ni'ma al-wakeel" — "God is sufficient for me and He is the best disposer of affairs" — a phrase of resignation and righteous indignation that echoed across football fans throughout the Arab world.

But not everyone in Egypt was left in mourning. "You achieved something unprecedented. The future will be even better," tweeted Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Ahmed Shobeir, the legendary goalkeeper who stood between the posts for Egypt at the 1990 World Cup and father of the current number one, wrote: "Thank you… you were men."

And the truth? Egypt have every reason to be proud. This match has become an instant World Cup classic — one in which they played a central, vital role.

Moreover, Egypt entered this game with nothing to lose and everything to gain. They had already done the unthinkable twice in this tournament: securing their first-ever World Cup victory, advancing to the knockout stage for the first time in their history, and then beating Australia in the round of sixteen. Each milestone was historic.

That liberated spirit showed vividly in the first half, both in Yasser Ibrahim's surprise opener and in Shobeir's penalty save.

When Amam Ashour — one of Egypt's standout performers throughout the tournament — was forced off injured, manager Hossam Hassan used the substitution to consolidate and shift the team's style. He brought on Hamdi Fathi, a more defensively-minded player, effectively sacrificing possession in the second half in favour of compactness and the counter-attack.

It worked to near-perfection. Both the disallowed Zizo goal and his legitimate strike that temporarily made it 2-0 to the Pharaohs came from brilliant transitions — full of joy, freedom, and incisive football.

What happened in the end goes beyond football alone, and somehow it accompanies Argentina at this World Cup, just as it did at the last one. Legal or otherwise, favouritism or coincidence, one cannot ignore the fact that there is something special around this team. Something that even Egypt, on one of the greatest days in their footballing history, could not overcome.

So yes, the Egyptians feel hard done by, and that is entirely understandable. And yet, they leave their fourth World Cup with their heads held high — after a magnificent match, and a defeat only to the reigning world champions and the greatest player of all time. This could be a watershed moment in Egypt's relationship with the game they love — one of Africa's most storied football nations and a giant of the Arab world. As for Mohamed Salah, who put in a magnificent individual performance — with brilliant creative play and yet another stamp of confirmation that he is the finest Egyptian footballer of all time — this tournament has helped him shake off the burden of constant comparisons to Mohamed Abu Trika, the hero of Al-Ahly and the Egypt national team from the early 2000s. The one blemish that remains on his CV is the Africa Cup of Nations — Egypt's bread and butter, a trophy they have claimed a record seven times — which Salah has yet to win.

Despite the frustration, both Egypt and Salah can look back on this summer in North America as a genuine success. A summer to be proud of.