From "The Donkey's Alley" to "The Lion's Den" .. The story of Professor Mohamed Wahbi.
about 2 hours ago
Sport
From "The Donkey's Alley" to "The Lion's Den" .. The story of Professor Mohamed Wahbi.
Hesspress Sports·
In photographs, Mohamed Wahbi often appears to occupy the edge of the event rather than its center. He stands tense, ready to escape the camera lights. The glasses add to his schoolboy appearance. His philosophy is clear: let actions speak for themselves.
Mohamed Wahbi did not reach the football elite through the usual path taken by its champions: no career as a famous player, no archive of goals, no old shirt hanging on the locker room wall as a testament to his authority justified by a history of achievements on the pitch, as is the case with most national team coaches. His authority accumulated in smaller rooms: classrooms, youth fields, coaches' offices, and the corridors where parents wait.
The neighborhood where this journey began has an unusual name in the suburbs of Brussels, in the Schaerbeek area. Its name: Rue des Ânes! There, on September 7, 1976, a boy was born who would carry the name Mohamed Mohamed to a Moroccan family from the city of Nador, from the Beni Yashkur tribe, with the surname: Wahbi.
Brussels, like other cities in Western Europe, has been a city accommodating thousands of families like the Wahbi family since the 1960s, following waves of labor migration from Morocco, Turkey, and elsewhere, when Belgium's mines and factories needed labor. The parents toiled, and the children built a Belgium of their own in the yards and staircases: French at school, Berber or dialect at home, and football everywhere in between.
Mohamed Wahbi was not yet ten years old when Mexico hosted the World Cup. Belgium was there, and the Wahbi family supported it like any family holding Belgian papers, Belgian jobs, and a Belgian life. But alongside Belgium, there was a dark horse in the tournament coming from the south, from Africa: Morocco, which ignited a flame in the heart of young Mohamed. Morocco, in its second appearance in the finals, became the first African and Arab team to advance beyond the group stage, holding its ground against England and Poland, and sweeping past Portugal, before narrowly falling to West Germany in the round of sixteen.
For a ten-year-old boy living in an apartment building in the Schaerbeek neighborhood of Brussels, that journey was a guide: a guide that the country his parents spoke of with a sense of nostalgia, and perhaps also with a sense of grievance or sadness because they had to seek a living in exile, could also occupy a pitch in Mexico and command respect from adults. It seemed that the boy understood that summer that football was one of the few things capable of traversing worlds and hearts without the need for a visa.
Mohamed, like all children his age, loved football and played it with his friends in the street and in the alleys near their homes. However, he was not talented enough to turn his love for the game into a professional playing career. But something else was forming deep within him: a sense of organization, the ability to notice which child needed encouragement, which one carried a seed of talent that needed nurturing, and the capacity to transform a handful of unruly children into something resembling a team.
Before becoming a football coach, Mohamed Wahbi studied to graduate as a school teacher. He once said that he always hoped to combine his teaching profession with his passion for football, and this is what he would do throughout a career spanning two decades of nurturing and training boys and young men in football.
At the age of twenty-one, in 1997, he took his first position in the youth department of Maccabi Brussels, a small club closer to a social and educational association. Here, we cannot overlook the symbolism of a young man of Moroccan descent, from a Muslim family, starting his coaching career in a Jewish club. It is one of the cases of diversity and coexistence that the first two generations of Moroccan immigrants lived through, where identities coexisted more easily than the situations that later arose when political ambitions imposed division among the children of the same neighborhood.
For six seasons, Mohamed built and developed training sessions, learned to read the situations in the locker room, and discovered that his temperament suited this particular type of work: work away from the spotlight, but foundational and impactful.
In the 2003-2004 season, Mohamed Wahbi moved to the Anderlecht Academy in Neerpede, one of the leading training centers in Belgium, and indeed in Europe, starting with the under-nine age group. There, among the young boys who ran under his supervision in those early years, were names that would later shine and turn professional in the biggest European clubs, but until that time, they were children who had not yet seen the light at the end of the tunnel. Here, youth academies in football emerge as a source of constant tension, promising transformation and development while continuously selecting and excluding; Wahbi remained within this tension for seventeen years, coaching all age groups from the youngest youth to under twenty-one.
In the 2014-2015 season, he led the under-21 team to the semifinals of the European Youth League, an unprecedented achievement for the club. In the following season, he was promoted to assistant coach of the first team at Anderlecht under Besnik Hasi, tasting the flavor of football at the senior level when the club finished the season as runners-up in the Belgian Pro League and advanced far in the European League. After a coaching change, he returned to youth development. This step may seem like a professional setback, but for Wahbi, it confirmed his specialization and distinction. He won the Belgian Under-17 Championship in 2018 and obtained his UEFA Pro coaching license. When he left the club in 2021, after seventeen years, he had become the coordinator of the youth sector, responsible not just for one team, but for the entire training philosophy in one of the most prestigious football academies in Europe.
The recognition from the Anderlecht Academy, upon his departure, expressed institutional gratitude that many of the club's great stars were shaped under his guidance before embarking on brilliant careers abroad. As for Wahbi, he said it was not just a great school for young players, but also a school for coaches.
Mohamed Wahbi, the coach, like any dedicated teacher in his mission, knows that understanding is harder and slower than enforcing obedience. An obedient player can be directed with instructions, but he will always wait for instructions, while a smart player must be allowed to make mistakes from which he will learn. That patience is what will lead him in a few years to the crowning of the Moroccan under-twenty national team with the World Cup. Will this philosophy succeed in leading him to the final of the senior World Cup?
By the time Morocco's call came, the word "community" had ceased to describe merely residents living outside the national territory. In football, the term "community" became a second national academy spread across Europe. Moroccan migration to Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Spain began on a large scale through labor recruitment in the 1960s; what was imagined as a temporary transition became a permanent settlement, with children born in European cities, entering European schools and clubs, while maintaining ties to Morocco, materially through financial remittances, socially through extended families, and emotionally through the annual summer journey to the cities of Nador, Al Hoceima, Tangier, and others.
When a dual-nationality player chooses between two football federations competing for his allegiance, he is not merely choosing a shirt; he is choosing between two identities that do not necessarily conflict within him as much as they coexist. Belgium, or the Netherlands, or Spain, or France may represent the system he was formed in, his friends, and his daily language. But Morocco represents deeper things: parents, grandparents, family pride, and the possibility of becoming a symbol representing a homeland. This is the policy Morocco adopted as part of its long-term project to develop football: striving vigorously to encourage the children of Moroccans to return to a homeland that perhaps had not offered them anything before, but needs them in the journey of building, and honoring the legacy of their parents' toil and hard work, deserving that the children look south to build the glory of the homeland to which their fathers belong.
In March 2022, the Royal Moroccan Football Federation appointed Mohamed Mohamed Wahbi as the coach of the Moroccan under-20 national team. The initial results were not in his favor. Morocco failed to reach the final of the 2023 Africa U-20 Cup of Nations, and there was, inevitably, doubt as to whether a coach fully trained in Belgian club academies could translate that training into the more turbulent and less institutionally patient world of national team football, where results are demanded on a short timeline, and where a single knockout match can destroy months of hard work. But the Moroccan federation stood firm in its position. And so did he.
That patience was rewarded in a way few could have imagined. Morocco won the 2024 North African U-20 Championship, qualifying for the 2025 Africa U-20 Cup of Nations in Egypt, where his team topped its group, defeated the host country in the semifinals, and finished as runners-up after a narrow defeat to South Africa in the final. That defeat could have shaken the entire project, but, in a teacher's style, it became part of the lesson, not the end of the journey.
Then came Chile, and the 2025 U-20 World Cup, a tournament that turned Mohamed Wahbi into a name spoken of across the Arab and African football world. Morocco defeated the United States in the quarterfinals, overcame France on penalties in the semifinals, and beat Argentina 2-0 in the final in Santiago on October 19, 2025, becoming the first Arab team and the second African team ever to win this tournament. Two of his players took home the golden and silver balls of the tournament, a testament to a coach who built a true attacking identity and did not settle for building a defensive strength and waiting for a stroke of luck that might come from counterattacks.
The victory was about identity and unity, about presenting an image of Morocco built on solidarity and collective spirit, the same values Morocco showcased to the world in the 2022 Qatar World Cup. Wahbi spoke about breaking the imaginary ceiling, and the fear that prevents African and Arab teams from believing in their ability to go all the way, and how Walid Regragui's journey to the semifinals in 2022 lit a green light for all who came after him. As for Wahbi personally, Chile closed a circle that began in 1986: the ten-year-old boy in Brussels, who watched Morocco become the first African team to reach the knockout stage of the World Cup, became, nearly forty years later, the coach behind the Moroccan under-twenty team, crowned world champion.
In March 2026, Walid Regragui, who achieved Morocco's historic semifinal in the 2022 World Cup, left. Here, instead of searching for a prominent name abroad, as the federation had done for decades, the federation turned inward, to the man who had just brought Morocco a world title in the youth category, and entrusted him with the national team's top task. The step was presented as part of the broader "Morocco 2030" project, linking the senior team to training and women's football. But the symbolism was unmistakable: the national team would now be led by a Moroccan formed in Europe, who had proven his worth in youth football, produced by the same cross-border system that had produced many of its players.
It is, by any measure, a bold decision: a coach who has never coached a single match for a senior club, appointed to lead a team comprising players who are some of the key pillars of major European clubs, just three months or so before the World Cup. And here is a point that cannot be overlooked: Walid Regragui also took over the national team three months before the Qatar World Cup.
Some said it was a risky adventure and recklessness on the part of the federation, and perhaps many said that. As for Wahbi, the professor, he took on the task, like any professional teacher, as the next step in a project he had been building since he was twenty-one years old in an amateur club in Brussels.
In the 2026 World Cup, Wahbi led Morocco to a penalty shootout victory over the Netherlands to qualify for the round of sixteen, before facing the co-host Canada. Whatever the final result of the tournament, the story of how he got there, from coaching children in Schaerbeek to standing toe-to-toe with Brazil and then eliminating the Netherlands, has rewritten some assumptions about how national team coaches are made.
This, in miniature, is the story of an entire generation of children from the Moroccan community across Europe: Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Spain, born or raised far from Morocco, but who have never completely left it, learning to carry a European passport and a Moroccan heart. Wahbi's own journey reflects a decision made by dozens of community players when they chose to represent Morocco instead of the countries they were born or raised in. It also represents a shift in the status of the community's knowledge itself: previous generations of immigrants were primarily imagined through financial remittances; whereas Wahbi belongs to a later pattern where the experience itself is a transfer of knowledge, not just financial.
In this context, the tremendous effort made and being made by the Royal Federation under the presidency of Mr. Fouzi Lekjaa and his entire team to encourage Moroccan talents in Europe to wear the Moroccan jersey cannot be overlooked. This is an effort we hope will extend to other areas, to initiate the reverse phase of brain drain, and to reclaim brilliant Moroccan minds capable of realizing the royal ambition of investing in human capital. If the pressures of life over the past decades have pushed thousands of Moroccans to seek work contracts outside Morocco, the opportunity is now available to attract the minds that have flourished outside Morocco to come and build a new Morocco, which today and tomorrow becomes a destination for welcoming minds from all over the world.
