Hakimi, the Madrid player who eliminated Spain in the World Cup

Hakimi could have played in the World Cup with Spain. In fact, when he was 17 years old, he went to train with the Spanish under-17 team, where he met the goalkeeper he beat, Unai Simón. But once the Moroccan Football Federation discovered that there was a boy born of Moroccans who was showing good manners in the lower categories of Madrid, everything changed. Hakimi decided that he would play with his father’s land. “I feel a bit from here and a bit from there, but I want to play for Morocco”, this boy who has risen like foam in the world of football, usually explains, but who does not forget how, from time to time, it was his turn to suffer racism. “I was leaving training at the Ciutat Esportiva in Madrid and going to dinner. And every two or three times the police stopped me. They saw an Arab face with a nice car and thought he had stolen it. The first time I laughed. When it happens to you often, you end up with it. You always look at them when you arrive at an airport, at a checkpoint. You suspect them if you wear branded clothes,” he said in an interview with the newspaper The world years ago.

Achraf’s parents, Saida and Hassan, left their country when they were just 20 years old. They could not find stable work and, taking advantage of the fact that they had a relative in Getafe, they saved up to cross the strait. At first they worked without papers, as much as they could, sharing a flat with other Moroccans. Finally, they were able to find a flat for themselves, which they paid for as they could, with precarious jobs. Saida cleaned houses without getting anyone to give her a contract: she was paid in black. Hassan went to a market in a Getafe neighborhood to sell what he could, acting as a street vendor. More than once they could not afford two meals for their three children. And when the eldest of the three, Achraf, asked them for football boots, they saved as much as they could to buy the cheapest ones.

Hakimi started playing at the Colonia Ofigevi club in the Juan de la Cierva neighborhood of Getafe, where more than once they helped him with meals. A club that disappeared in 2009, when a Madrid scout had already discovered that boy who would go on to make his debut in the Real Madrid first team. With the white club he started as a striker, but little by little he changed his position until he ended up as a winger, taking advantage of his imposing physique. It is fast, technical and electric. After making his debut at the Bernabéu and scoring two goals in the First Division, he was loaned to Borussia Dortmund in Germany for two years. Despite his high level of play, which led him to make his debut with the Morocco national team, Madrid preferred to sell him to Italian Inter in 2020. In Milan, he would only last one year, as PSG paid 60 million for him in 2021. With the French, he made his debut with a goal. He now lives in the French capital with his wife, the Spanish actress Hiba Abouk. A woman with Libyan, Tunisian and Gypsy blood whom he met in Madrid in 2018.

Hakimi, who already played at the 2018 World Cup, has now become one of the heroes of the best-ever Moroccan national team, a team that had never reached the quarter-finals of this competition before. And to celebrate, he went to look for his mother, present in the stands. The first thing he did with a salary from Madrid, in fact, was to buy a flat for his parents who owned it, although they asked him not to make it very big. They didn’t need it. He does prefer to live in a large apartment in Paris, where he is seen hand in hand with his wife at fashion shows and film premieres. Life smiles at him. And he thinks about the trip his parents took.