Majdi Al-Saeedi - Tunisia
The Tunisian derby match between Esperance and the Club Africain has left widespread controversy and reactions because of the involvement of the local champions and the CAF Champions League in the past two years, eight players at once, including four Algerians.
The Esperance coach, who won the match 2-1, involved the largest number of foreign players in the history of the Tunisian League to open the doors of a wide-ranging controversy over the negative repercussions on the club's identity and the potential effects on its rising players from the Young Academy.
The Tunisian Esperance, which has dominated Tunisian and African football in the past two years, has become the first Tunisian team to include 7 players who hold Algerian citizenship in one season, and they are Abdelkader Badran, Ilyas El Shati, Bilal bin Saha, Abdel Raouf bin Ghaith, Al Tayyeb Meziani, Mohamed Amin Toghay and Abdel Rahman Meziane.
Esperance 🇹🇳 2020 sponsored by Algeria 🇩🇿 |
Esperance took advantage of the new law that allows clubs to register players from North African countries as local rather than foreigners, to open its doors to a record number of Algerians, which has sparked accusations of denying young players the opportunity to participate with the first team.
Athletic and financial investment
While Algerian player Abdel Raouf Ben Ghaith refused to comment on the opinions that consider Esperance the champion of Tunisia and Africa 2018 and 2019 to become more Algerian than Tunisian, the coach of the Esperance Club, Kamel El Kelsi, believes that his team took advantage of the new laws approved by the Tunisian Federation for the game to adopt a spherical strategy aimed at benefiting Among those stars who did not cost the club treasury a lot of money, as he described it.
"The technical level of the Algerian player, the low cost of his assignment and the ease of his integration are behind our move to the Algerian league to bring the players and then invest in selling them to other clubs, as is the case with Youssef Al-Balaili, who moved to Al-Ahly in a record deal," Al-Kulaisi told Al Jazeera Net.
Abdelnour Belhousini⚽ Talent of a rising Algerian ملAl-nicknamed Ghrizman Algeria ⚽ Fancy skills and passes⚽ |
However, Al-Qusais believes, in contrast, that the law regulating players from North Africa as local must be generalized to all neighboring countries, and that it does not remain the preserve of the Tunisian League until the Tunisian players also find the opportunity to professionalize.
During its General Assembly in December 2018, the Tunisian Football Federation approved allowing players from Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, Libya and Mauritania to sign Tunisian clubs as local players, which motivated the Premier League clubs to turn to North African players to strengthen their ranks.
For his part, the players ’agent, Mehrez Aouaida, revealed that the prestigious position of the Algerian football is the main reason behind the Tunisian Esperance's appointment to the players’ mandate, and the agents also pushed more and more to the Algerian league, which is filled with players who are able to shine in Tunisia.
The founder of Esperance is an Algerian mother, and we love our sisters from Algeria, playing for us, and an honor for them to wear the clothes of the Apostle of Africa, Viva, Esperance Hasta Lamorati. - Adnenabdelli (@ Adnenabdelliho2) January 21, 2020 |
Aweidah told Al Jazeera Net, "The Algerian team's achievements in the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations and the brilliance of many stars of desert warriors explain the Tunisian clubs' interest, especially Esperance to go to Algeria to recruit players who are easily adapted due to the closeness of customs and language."
He added that Youssef Al-Bailaili and Baghdad Bounajah were, until not long ago, stars in the Tunisian league with Esperance and the coastal star before they contributed effectively to crowning Algeria in the nations of Africa 2019.
Algerian identity
Although the Algerian professional team has starred in Esperance, the controversy has not stopped over "this unprecedented invasion" in the history of the club's most prestigious in Tunisia, but the club's management has received sharp criticism for not giving opportunity to the Tunisian players, which could endanger the team's future in the coming years.
Some social media pages have gone so far as to talk that Esperance has become a team with a purely Algerian identity, since more than half of its squad is made up of players from Algeria.
In the past, while I was young, the African people were very popular, so Algeria has the Algerian players to play in, from Magharebia, Amroush, Wow, and now, please, see where there are Algerian women hahaha - NAS🇩🇿SER (@ rahim92n) January 18, 2020 |
Those positions seem subjective, according to Tunisian coach Hammadi Aldo, who in the past two years has supervised the Algerian defense club Taganant and believes that the results of Esperance in local and continental competitions confirm that the direction he chose was correct.
Classico Tunisia |
Aldo attributes the reasons that Esperance went to the Algerian league to recruit players to the scarcity of the local market, the reluctance of Tunisian clubs to form players, and the decline in interest in grassroots work, he said.
The Tunisian League saw this year an unprecedented presence of the 26 Algerian players in 14 clubs in the Premier League.