To Scotland With Love: A Moroccan poet looks forward to the World Cup

by Mouna Ouafik

I often tell myself that if I could go back in time, I would do nothing but keep playing football. Truly.

If football is a religion for Brazilians, a living inheritance and a mirror of identity for the Scots, and a shared breath and fragile unity for Haitians, then for us Moroccans it has never been merely a game. It is a prize, a pulse, a way of life. A moment in which a nation is constantly reinvented, when reality fractures and cities turn into stands, and the flag becomes a heart beating in every home.

In my childhood, I bargained with the world. I would help my mother with everything, just for a single permission: to play football. Everything could become a ball—pens, plastic cups, shoes, bags, kitchen utensils, sometimes even sheets of paper wrapped in tape. I would invent a ball out of anything and drag it with me through the house and into the street, as if play required no authorization from anyone.

A plastic ball would cut into my feet in winter, leaving small wounds of pain on my body, but I kept running anyway—against pain, against the gaze that told me this was not my place. As if the world itself conspired to grant me only one thing: to keep chasing the ball.

My mother says that in an old video filmed by my father with a heavy camera—then considered almost miraculous—there is a moment when I am four years old. Whenever a match begins on television, I suddenly straighten up in front of the screen, as if my body remembers its true alignment. I lift my shoulders and sit differently, as though I have entered another state entirely. Not entertainment, but presence.

I remember the scissor kicks I used to perform in the air before falling onto my back on the asphalt. People would gather, mouths open in astonishment, but no one clapped. They would shout instead, delighted: “Mouna is a proper footballer!”

That is how I first learned gravity—and how I began to ignore it.

I broke many windows. I received scoldings, punishments, and endless reproaches. But no day passed without me touching a ball.

Near the lighthouse, in the neighborhood of Al-Mohit , my first form was shaped. My childhood and adolescence, the first outlines of memory, were all built while chasing a ball through endless blue mornings. From there, I learned a simple truth: I could not pass a spinning ball without touching it.

The alleys of Hay Al-Mohit, La Boca in Argentina—where children once asked me where I had learned to caress the ball with such  effortless skill—and streets in Egypt, Turkey, and every city I later crossed in my travels: football was always the first language. Few know I briefly played with the FAR team in my adolescence. But my true story with the ball began long before any club. It began in the street.

In my teenage years, I was once offered a place in the Moroccan women’s national team by the head coach himself. The same day, I was told no. My mother’s refusal alone was enough to redirect an entire trajectory—but never enough to take the ball away from me.

Every time I play football, dopamine and adrenaline take over everything. Life sharpens. My mind and body switch into high-performance mode. Everything becomes vivid, charged, accelerated. Ideas flash like sparks. Emotion intensifies. I feel like a heroine inside an action film—fast cuts, rapid movement, overwhelming energy. My heart races, my blood surges, my mind becomes a studio projecting scenes from every angle at once.

When I am exhausted, or even when I sink into meaninglessness, it is enough to return to our World Cup matches in Qatar to find myself again. I do not merely watch victory—I rehearse it in memory. I belong to a people who deserve joy, even when joy exhausts them.

I remember my uncle’s hand cutting kif near a fish tagine on the day of our match against Scotland in the 1998 World Cup in France. His fingers, stained green with herbs, seemed to transfer something like ecstasy into the food itself. The fish shimmered with oil like skin just emerged from the sea. Those same fingers would load the “sebsi” , a traditional long Moroccan pipe,and return to the ritual of herbs and smoke.

Kif—soft, sacred, smoked by quiet men in small cafés where dice are thrown, cards shuffled, and tea is endlessly poured. Places where laughter resists the logic of consumer cities, and where voices are allowed to be loud without apology.

In 1998, football breathed with us: Bassir, Kamatcho, Naybet, Chippo, Chiba,  Hadji. Every match felt like a dish still being cooked, a tension not yet resolved. Our chests trembled like abandoned stadiums remembering every dribble, every shot, every ball that kissed the post and refused to enter.

Then came the silence of elimination, and all the talk—about calculations, about Norway and Brazil, about what might have been if the world had tilted differently. Something broke quietly that day. My uncle’s hand cried. Mine cried too. We returned to the kitchen as if nothing else existed in the world but things that could be eaten.

Our hands—once covered in spices—became small national flags. His hand that cooked tagine, my hand that knew turmeric, couscous wisdom, and red pepper fire. His hand that cut herbs, my hand that understood mint, thyme, and henna. The same hands that laughed, and the same hands that cried.

We cried for three days. And in Moroccan homes, it was never just a match—it was the mood of an entire country breaking and quietly reassembling itself.

Years later, walking alone through Edinburgh, I felt the shadow of that World Cup sliding between ancient stones. My steps echoed on wet ground like fragments of memory speaking back. The cold air stung my face but widened my breath, as if each inhale reopened something essential.

In the narrow streets, where windows glowed softly in the rain, I felt not entirely alone. As if the ghosts of Scottish players I once admired—John Collins, Darren Jackson, Craig Burley—walked somewhere beside me, quietly amused by time itself, by Jim Leighton who once conceded three of our goals.

All of this unfolded while I hummed the song that accompanied Morocco in 1998—the same song I still listen to before every World Cup match,as my personal good-luck ritual!

Scotland, which I never imagined visiting twenty-six years after our encounter on the pitch, unsettled me gently. Not lost—just displaced in the most precise way. The air there does not flatter. It declares itself: honest, raw, sometimes severe.

On the shore of the Firth of Forth, the waves seemed to wink at me: You are here, free and alone, but not separate.

Scotland… a fragment of the heart. A second homeland large enough to contain me and my ghosts. A mood more than a place—slightly rough, deeply sincere, refusing performance.

Scotland stole my heart. And it never gave it back.

Its national team is the only team I do not wish to defeat, but to draw with—so that neither memory is wounded, so that history forgets its need for winners, and so that we might qualify together—as if the World Cup draw had erred in putting us in the same group from the very beginning.

I am grateful that I lived to see Morocco finish fourth in the World Cup in Qatar.
Grateful that I witnessed our youth lift the World Cup in Chile.
Grateful for the Africa Cup of Nations victory—the second in our history.

We have always had strong teams. And finally, we received what we deserved. Long live Morocco.

For me, Scotland is not an opponent. It is another possibility of love—inside a ball still rolling endlessly through memory.