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A wound in the weakest link of Morocco's project: Lekjaa sounds the alarm

The other side of Moroccan football's renaissance: a major crisis awaiting a solution

Moroccan football keeps making striking gains at national-team level, in infrastructure and on the international stage. Yet Fouzi Lekjaa, president of the Royal Moroccan Football Federation, has once again sounded the alarm over a very different reality inside the domestic league. He warned of mounting debts, growing disputes and matches turning into an arena for protests.

The warning carries real weight. It comes from the man who has run Moroccan football since 2014, a period that launched a string of financial and administrative reform projects. The available financial data tell a troubling story: several of the biggest clubs still face debts and disputes worth millions of dollars. That raises fresh questions about how far the reforms have gone in tackling one of the most complex files in the professional game.

A clear technical gap: protests and debts have become the hallmark of the tournament
During a preparatory workshop for the 2026-2027 sporting season, Lekjaa told the meeting of professional league coaches and members of the National Technical Directorate that the domestic league is a different beast to previous eras, when Moroccan clubs were the main source of players for the national teams.
He explained that Morocco's recent participation in the World Cup in the United States laid this gap bare. The domestic league contributed just two reserve goalkeepers to the national team, while foreign clubs supplied the bulk of the internationals.
The core of the national teams, he added, now leans increasingly on graduates of the Mohammed VI Football Academy, alongside players plying their trade in the European leagues.
Lekjaa then turned his fire on the domestic competitions. League matches, he said, have become an arena for protests and mutual accusations over refereeing and the filing of complaints, rather than a stage for developing the technical level.
He also warned that mounting debts and financial deficits at the clubs have driven up the number of dispute files before the judicial and appeals committees. Their effects have reached FIFA, with the number of cases linked to Moroccan clubs continuing to rise.
The federation president offered no figures to illustrate the scale of the crisis he described, according to the report published by Radio Mars two days ago.
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The numbers tell the story: debts of millions of dollars and ongoing disputes
The data published during 2026 reveals a more detailed picture. Figures from the professional league showed that only 8 clubs in the first division have financial disputes amounting to nearly 29.5 million dirhams, roughly 3.2 million dollars.
Ittihad Tangier top the list with more than 12.5 million dirhams (around 1.3 million dollars). Difaa El Jadidi follow with about 7.2 million dirhams (around 770,000 dollars), then Wydad AC with close to 3.9 million dirhams (around 420,000 dollars).
Wydad's documents reflect a larger crisis. Their obligations towards staff and players reached 30.75 million dirhams (around 3.3 million dollars), of which 18.8 million dirhams (around two million dollars) are unpaid signing bonuses.
Disputes rumble on elsewhere too. Of a total 41 million dirhams owed to other clubs, 28.2 million dirhams (around 3 million dollars) remain the subject of cases before FIFA or the Court of Arbitration for Sport, while the club's cash liquidity has turned from a surplus into a negative balance.
Raja Club Athletic tell a different story. A financial assessment showed the deficit falling from 145.6 million dirhams to 99.5 million dirhams (from around 15.6 million dollars to 10.6 million dollars) between 2024 and 2025. Yet the provisions linked to legal and tax disputes stayed above 109 million dirhams (around 11.7 million dollars), a sign of the continuing effects of accumulated cases.
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12 years of reforms, and the financial file is still not closed
Lekjaa has served as president of the Royal Moroccan Football Federation since 2014. Those years have transformed Moroccan football: the national teams have flourished, infrastructure has grown, tournaments have arrived, and the country has strengthened its standing within international football institutions. The professional league's budget has also risen to 965 million dirhams for the new season, roughly 103 million dollars.
Yet the clubs' finances have remained a problem at almost every turn, despite repeated talk of reforming the professional system and tightening financial governance.
Each new term, the federation ties its rhetoric to continuing reform and consolidating gains. The warnings Lekjaa issued this week have dragged the same old problems back into the spotlight, chief among them debts, financial deficits and a string of disputes.

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A repair that took years... and a law that remained suspended
Converting clubs from associations into sports companies is one of the most important projects put forward by the federation to address financial imbalances. But this process began slowly.
The law regulating this transition was issued in 2004, yet Lekjaa admitted in October 2025 that the law "was not implemented as required". He explained that the first real experiments only began in recent years, before the government stepped in with tax incentives to speed up the transition.
One of the most important tools of financial reform, then, needed many years before anyone put it into practice, despite remaining a central pillar in the rhetoric of professionalism reform.
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Legitimate questions
These figures do not mean that the project to develop Moroccan football has failed. The national teams have made remarkable strides, the infrastructure has developed, and Morocco have strengthened their presence both continentally and internationally in recent years. Lekjaa's own statements tell a different story elsewhere, though. The professional league, meant to be the natural base of this project, still suffers from financial and technical imbalances that the federation president admits limit its ability to keep pace with those achievements.
Those statements carry particular weight because they come from the man who has led the football system for more than twelve years. Across his successive terms he has flown the banner of continuing reform and strengthening professionalism. Now the figures reveal persistent debts and disputes, and Lekjaa acknowledges the widening gap between the national team and the domestic league. One question is hard to ignore: if Moroccan football is living through one of its most successful eras at international level, why does the domestic league, after more than a decade of reforms, still represent the weakest link in this project? Are the measures being discussed today enough to address a crisis that has run for years, or does the file need a deeper review of the reform path itself?
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