Halilhodzic breaks silence: "What I experienced in Morocco was a real nightmare"

Vahid Halilhodzic has still not moved on. Three years after his departure from the Morocco national team, the 74-year-old Bosnian coach gave a bitter account of the circumstances surrounding his exit, which occurred in August 2022 — just four months before the start of the World Cup in Qatar.

“Since I left Morocco, I haven’t watched a single second of their matches. Not a single second, because what I experienced there was a real nightmare,” said the coach, who had nonetheless qualified the Atlas Lions for the 2022 World Cup after his appointment in August 2019 as a replacement for Hervé Renard.

To justify the dismissal, the president of the Royal Moroccan Football Federation, Fouzi Lekjaa, notably pointed to “his tendency to exclude key players from the national team” — a direct allusion to the sidelining of Hakim Ziyech — and believed that “Moroccans were beginning to tire of his philosophy”.

Arguments that Halilhodzic categorically refuses. “I had prepared everything with enormous care. Being sidelined without valid reason is something you don’t forget. This wound is still present today,” he added.

What followed made the pill even harder to swallow. Under his successor Walid Regragui, Morocco achieved a historic run in Qatar, reaching the semi-finals — a first for an African nation in the World Cup. Achraf Hakimi and his teammates successively eliminated Spain and Portugal before losing to France.