Are the Moroccan national team players Moroccan?

I come from a world in which the idea of nation did not exist, let alone that of state. The only collective belonging was that of the tribe and a vague notion of one's own identity based on certain differential values supposedly exclusive to our "race" (a Castilianism that meant "us"). Beyond this close dimension of parents and family, there was nothing. The Moroccan homeland has never represented us, being as it is founded on the supremacy of the Arabophones and the Frenchified elites who have always looked with contempt on the north, the savages of the Rif. As for the Moroccan state, the regime has done nothing but mistreat the region from the very moment it passed from the hands of the Spanish colonizer to the colonizer Hassan II. So that those of us who come from there have inherited nothing but silence and suspicion towards the mahzen, the vigilant and corrupt state that with its repression and abandonment led us to the diaspora. We did not emigrate, we were expelled from the place where we were born and we have taken root in the neighborhoods on the periphery of the periphery of European cities. As second-class citizens here, we live infinitely better than we would have lived in "our land". 

We are here because Morocco continues to be a tyrannical and corrupt regime that keeps its “subjects” in misery while its king lives in luxury palaces in Paris or gives very expensive jewelry to foreign dignitaries. All the families scattered throughout Europe carry the same bitter taste in their throats: that of knowing themselves to be more exiles than immigrants. And having pushed forward alone, with only the help of other members of the tribe, overcoming racism and precariousness, fighting to allow their children to live better. These descendants, who are who they are because their parents' efforts have been made in democracies with universal education and healthcare, with opportunities unimaginable in their origin, are more children of Europe than of Morocco, even though Europe continues to not see them as its own. Except, of course, if they are stars in their field. Then integration and recognition are automatic, nothing to do with the men who are struggling these days on the roads or with the women who clean houses and care for the elderly.

Footballers in a World Cup highlight the friction and contradictions of a world organized into collective identities that do not always coincide with the borders of the states represented by the national teams. Due to the complexity within (there are 8 Catalans in the Spanish team, said Gabriel Rufián) but also due to the hypocrisy in the treatment of descendants of immigration, which changes depending on successes and bank account figures. Pure hypocrisy is also what the Moroccan government practices by recruiting players among the children and grandchildren of those exiled by its extractive and repressive policy. Some have never set foot there and only agree to be part of it because they have not been selected by their real country, which is the one in which they were born and live. They have the right to take advantage of this opportunity, of course, the problem is not the players, the problem is a regime that, while continuing to imprison those who demonstrate to change the conditions in which the majority of Moroccans live, takes advantage of and claims as its own men for whom they have done absolutely nothing. Nothing more than mistreating their parents or grandparents by expelling them from their own country.

Ultimately, the Morocco of those of us who have settled on this side of the Strait is a very small Morocco: that of the women of our families, that of the joyful welcomes we received when we returned to the village every summer, that of the aromas that filled the houses to celebrate our return. There were no flags or national anthems there, only the affection of those who loved us and had to get used to missing us forever when we left.