Forget A Generation, Morocco Is Simply Golden

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here.

From a distance, it might be tempting to fit Morocco's recent rocket-ship rise up the global soccer hierarchy into the familiar story of the golden generation. To be fair, when a smaller and/or relatively unheralded country experiences this kind of ascent, it often is indeed thanks to the efforts of an especially fecund generation whose players reach maturity around the same time and take the country places it has never been before. But though Morocco's leap has been quick and massive—after missing the first five World Cups of this millennium, the Atlas Lions qualified in 2018 for the first time in 20 years, then made it to the semifinals four years later, and now enter this one with legitimate hopes of matching and maybe even surpassing that feat—the story here does not in fact mirror that of, say, Belgium. There's no single, solid core of similarly aged players responsible for this rise. And that might be the most important message they could send this summer: that Morocco is not only here, but here for good.