For Ninety Minutes, Morocco: Football and What it Means to Be Moroccan
On a June afternoon in 2026, the author watched Morocco's World Cup opener against Brazil from Tucson, Arizona, feeling geography fade as messages from friends and relatives in Casablanca, Rabat, Paris, and beyond lit up the screen. Fans across continents arranged their evenings around the ninety minutes, sharing anticipation and collective emotion as the 1-1 draw unfolded. The moment underscored not just a result, but Morocco's rapid ascent and the global resonance of football in connecting people across distance. Anthropologists have long studied such gatherings as communitas, a temporary sense of belonging born from shared spectacle rather than mere ritual, a theme explored through Max Gluckman and Victor Turner’s ideas about community in sports.
