During this World Cup so far, I’ve been fortunate enough to watch two completely different answers to a very similar question come through Mercedes-Benz Stadium a.k.a. Atlanta Stadium inside the same week, and it’s a question that interestingly ties back to the USMNT and our very own Atlanta United. The question is the one every ambitious soccer country, and club, eventually runs into, which is some version of “okay, how do we actually get good at this? How do we take our team to the next level?” Saudi Arabia and Morocco have answered it in almost perfectly opposite ways.
On the 21st it was Saudi Arabia, the country that has thrown more money at this sport faster than just about anybody in the history of the game, and Spain took them apart 4-0…the same Spain that couldn’t bag a goal against the legends, Cape Verde. Lamine Yamal scored against the Saudis, Mikel Oyarzabal snagged two, and Spain were so comfortable that both of those guys were sitting on the bench by halftime and it still didn’t change anything. That was Saudi Arabia’s heaviest World Cup defeat since Russia put five past them back in 2018, and it happened right here in our building.
Then three days later Morocco walked into the same stadium and beat Haiti 4-2 to punch their ticket into the Round of 32, and the wild part is that it wasn’t even a clean night for them. Yassine Bounou put one into his own net inside the first ten minutes to gift Haiti the lead (which is burying the lede a bit, because though it counted as an own goal, the back heel attempt deserves glory), Achraf Hakimi clawed it back level, and then Wilson Isidor absolutely uncorked one from outside the box that’s a legitimate goal-of-the-tournament candidate to shove Haiti right back in front. So an already-eliminated Haiti side had Morocco chasing the game twice. We know it didn’t matter in the end, as Ismael Saibari leveled it again right before halftime, Soufiane Rahimi finally nudged Morocco ahead in the 78th, and then Gessime Yassine tacked on a fourth in the dying minutes. So here’s a team that can play sloppy, fall behind twice to an opponent that’s already going home, and still have so many good players on the grass that it pulls away late and strolls into the knockouts. That sounds simple, but the manner in which Morocco and Saudi Arabia got to this point is incredibly fascinating.
I thought about this article yesterday while watching Morocco and Haiti trade blows, so I dove in to why these two relatively fledgling soccer projects are in such different places. The gap isn’t really about money, even though it looks like it on the surface, it’s just all about what the money was actually spent on.
Saudi Arabia spent money on their Saudi Pro League, not their national team
Saudi Arabia’s plan was blunt and enormous, and to be fair it absolutely worked at the thing it was designed to do. Through the country’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, they took ownership stakes in their four biggest clubs and went out and signed the most famous players alive. Cristiano Ronaldo to Al-Nassr, Karim Benzema to Al-Ittihad, Neymar to Al-Hilal, and a whole parade of names like Riyad Mahrez and Sadio Mané right behind them. In the summer of 2023 alone the Saudi Pro League spent something like $957 million on transfers, which Deloitte flagged as a record for any league outside of Europe, and the total sports spending runs into the billions once you count all the sponsorship deals. The league is genuinely a real thing now. Saudi clubs are running Asia, the stadiums are filling up, and a big chunk of the players at this World Cup get their checks from clubs over there.
And basically none of it has reached the national team, which is the part that should make everybody think. The Green Falcons came into this tournament ranked somewhere around 61st in the world and only scraped in through the extra fourth round of Asian qualifying, which they hosted, after failing to qualify automatically, and that’s for a 48-team field that was specifically expanded to make qualifying easier. They’ve run through three head coaches in two years, including firing Hervé Renard, the guy who actually masterminded that famous win over Argentina in 2022, and then handing the job to Georgios Donis a grand total of 59 days before the whole thing kicked off. It genuinely feels like this is a project that has no idea where it’s going.
When you dig into the why, it gets even more interesting, because the league might actually be working against the national team, more from a poor planning perspective than intentional sabotage, obviously. The clubs raised the foreign-player allotment all the way up to ten, which means only three Saudi players are even required to be on the field at any given moment, so the exact local players the national team needs are getting fewer minutes, not more. Their starting goalkeeper reportedly dropped down to the second division just to play regularly. Truthfully, the most accurate way to put it is that the league spending was never really sold as a national-team project in the first place. To be fair to them, Saudi Arabia does say it wants national-team success, that ambition is written right into the Vision 2030 sports goals, along with building youth academies and getting a lot more people playing the game.
However, that part is supposed to come from the grassroots side of the plan, not from importing ten foreign stars per club. The Crown Prince has been pretty clear that the league spending itself is a whole economic and image mirage. He essentially wants sports, especially soccer, to be a real chunk of the country’s GDP and doesn’t really care what anybody calls the plans, with the long-term idea being to build these clubs up as businesses and eventually hand them off to private capital. Therefore, the national team was always going to have to come from somewhere else, and the galactico model arguably makes that harder rather than easier. Even their own coach has admitted that turning the league’s rising level into actual national-team results is still a challenge. The easiest comparison is China about a decade ago, when the Chinese Super League briefly outspent the Premier League and their national team got a grand total of not better for it. Buying famous players raises a league’s profile in a hurry, but it does not, by itself, develop a single one of your own kids.
How Morocco built a World Cup powerhouse over two decades
Morocco did almost the exact opposite thing, and the reason it’s paying off now is that they started roughly twenty years ago and never got bored and rage quit the game for the quick dopamine hit of “We got Ronaldo.”. You can trace it back to 2008, when the King basically convened a national sports conference and laid out a long-term roadmap, quite literally the kind of boring planning document that nobody outside the country (and probably most inside the country) pays attention to and actually ends up mattering more than any single signing ever could. The signature piece landed in 2009 with the Mohammed VI Football Academy in Salé, and it was built for a fairly modest sum, somewhere around 13 million euros, with the whole thing designed to combine elite training with actual schooling so a kid who doesn’t make it still walks out with an education. People now mention that academy in the same breath as France’s Clairefontaine or Spain’s La Masia, and it’s pumped out a genuine banger of a list of players for the senior squad, guys like Youssef En-Nesyri, Nayef Aguerd, and Azzedine Ounahi, plus a bunch of the kids who went and won Morocco the U-20 World Cup last year.
The guy running the whole operation, Fouzi Lekjaa, has been the federation president since 2014, back when Morocco was sitting somewhere around 75th to 90th in the world. He’s based the entire program on three things he repeats constantly, which are facilities, talent, and qualified staff. In practice that’s looked like a nationwide buildout of synthetic pitches and floodlit stadiums, a network of regional training centers and academies, and the flagship Mohammed VI Complex that opened in 2019. He also forced the clubs to clean up their books and become actual regulated corporate entities instead of whatever they were before, and the federation hands first-division clubs an annual grant to keep them stable. It’s super unglamorous, system-level rules and regulations, but it’s specifically the area that money alone can’t shortcut.
Now, the part everybody talks about is the recruiting. Morocco’s roster is packed with guys who were born and raised in Europe but have Moroccan parents or grandparents, your Hakimis and Ziyechs and Mazraouis and the Amrabat brothers. For years a lot of those players were stuck, because the old FIFA rule said that the moment you played one competitive game for a country, even a single minute for Spain as a teenager, you were tied to them for life. Then in 2020 FIFA loosened it up, basically letting you switch as long as you hadn’t played much and had never turned out at a World Cup, and that freed up a whole wave of European-raised players to go suit up for their family’s country instead. Morocco went after that group harder than anybody.
I know the cynical take is that they just snagged a bunch of players who came up in France and Spain and Holland and put Moroccan kits on them, but that misses what’s actually happening. Take a look at it from the player’s side. If you’re a kid born in Madrid with a real choice to make about who to play for, you’re signing up because Morocco looks like a serious operation that’s actually going somewhere AND it’s the country you legitimately have a good chance of playing time with, and the only reason it looks that way is because of the academies and the facilities and the trophies they’ve been stacking. The stuff Morocco has built at home is what gives them the credibility, and that credibility is what reels in the bigger names. If you take the academies and the pipeline away, Morocco is just another federation cold-calling guys with the right last name and hoping the guy answers.
When you look at the receipts, it’s honestly a little absurd. The 2022 World Cup semifinal run that none of us will forget, the first ever for an African or Arab nation. They snagged Olympic bronze in 2024 and the U-20 World Cup title in 2025, then the Arab Cup. They hosted this year’s Africa Cup of Nations, and their women’s program reached a continental final. They’re also winning in futsal, which I was totally unaware of until I started researching this. Plus, they’re co-hosting the 2030 World Cup alongside Spain and Portugal. That’s not just one decent generation getting lucky in Qatar in 2022, that’s an entire system producing trophies across every category at once, which is something you simply can’t fake.
The fair caveats for both these countries
I want to be fair to both sides here, though. Saudi Arabia’s project is genuinely young, it’s about three years old, and they could absolutely climb by the time they host in 2034. If that higher level of league competition eventually starts lifting their local players, then the bet looks a lot smarter in hindsight and I’ll happily give credit where it’s due. And Morocco isn’t some spotless fairy tale either. Lekjaa is a polarizing figure who somehow runs the federation while also serving as a government budget minister and holding major roles at both CAF and FIFA, which is a pretty wild concentration of power that draws pretty fair conflict-of-interest criticism. Their AFCON title this year ended up getting fought over at the Court of Arbitration for Sport after Senegal were stripped, and for all the talk about Saudi Arabia’s coaching chaos, Morocco also swapped coaches right before this World Cup. The model is genuinely impressive, but they ain’t saintly, either.
How do Morocco and Saudi Arabia translate to Atlanta and U.S. Soccer?
Here’s why I think an Atlanta crowd specifically should care about any of this, though, because it’s not just a fun overseas case study. This is the same argument we have about our own soccer all the time, and about Atlanta United in particular. Do you build through the academy and the homegrown pipeline, the slow and unsexy way, or do you go buy a Designated Player and hope the spotlight does the work for you? Morocco’s answer is that those two things only work when they work together, that you invest in your own kids first and then the big names you bring in actually mean something, especially once the team settles in to real life and isn’t floating on expansion team money. To be fair, Atlanta United’s new President of Soccer, Mauricio Culebro, said in his introductory press conference when I asked that the club’s academy is performing so well, he wouldn’t change much.
The diaspora piece should hit home for any U.S. Soccer fan, because the dual-national debate that basically defines our national team is the exact lever Morocco pulled, and it only paid off for them because they had a legitimately credible home system to bolt it onto. With the U.S. Soccer National Training Center setting up shop right here in our backyard, and with Atlanta United’s community fund out here building mini-pitches all over Georgia, this isn’t like…some abstract thing happening on another continent. It’s essentially the same choice in front of soccer in our city right now.
Fans watched both philosophies walk through the Benz this week, and one of them looked like a billion-dollar billboard that got unplugged at halftime. The other team gifted an opponent two goals and still walked into the knockout stages, because when you build the system instead of buying the window, you always have another dude on the roster who can go score the next one.