North African Football, Decoded

When Morocco reached the semi-finals at Qatar 2022, every Arab person I knew – wherever they were in the world – lost their mind. Beyond the headlines and the euphoria, it felt like something else too: a rupture. A chance to rewrite what brands think this market is worth, and to shift how we’re seen globally. The 2030 World Cup hosting bid, co-shared with Spain and Portugal, followed soon after. Suddenly, every brand with a SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) strategy had a story to tell about North Africa – many of them for the first time. The speed of that narrative shift exposed how reactive most engagement had been, built for moments rather than maintained between them.

Kit deals are the most visible layer. But the brands that are genuinely embedded show up elsewhere: in retail environments, in grassroots partnerships, in street-level pricing. The kind of quieter, unglamorous work that rarely makes headlines between tournaments. As I wrote recently about Egypt on my Substack, adidas understood early that the Egyptian market needed accessibility as much as aspiration. It didn’t win that market through kit design. It won it through decades of consistent retail presence and democratic pricing that made the brand attainable for working-class communities long before the market was commercially “interesting”. That kind of consistency builds cultural equity that can’t be switched on in a tournament cycle.

That’s what real embeddedness looks like. It doesn’t announce itself in a kit launch. AFCON 2025 – held in Morocco this January – made that distinction clear, revealing who has been doing the deeper work, and who hasn’t. Right now, three very different strategies are playing out in real time.

Puma holds Morocco, Egypt, Senegal and Ghana, and its work with Morocco in particular shows what sustained cultural investment can look like. The AFCON 2025 collection was designed with Moroccan-Dutch artist Abderrahmane Trabsini, weaving in Zellige tilework patterns and, for the first time on a national kit, Amazigh language and Berber rug motifs.

The 2026 World Cup kit, released last month, builds on that same visual language: traditional Moroccan embroidery on the collar and cuffs, geometric patterns drawn from local craftsmanship on the away shirt. But just as telling was the launch. Puma launched the collection not in a stadium or a showroom, but at a block party in Brooklyn’s Domino Square, where locals from each of the 11 represented nations wore its kits. Taking Morocco to the diaspora first wasn’t incidental – it reads as the result of years of attention, not a reaction to a moment. Morocco 2030 isn’t the starting point; it’s the payoff.

Kappa’s relationship with Tunisia tells a quieter version of the same story. Since 2019, largely under the radar, the brand has been producing kits that treat Tunisian identity as a design system rather than a colour palette. The AFCON 2025 collection centred three kits around three distinct landscapes – the Mediterranean coast, traditional carpet weaving, the Sahara. Kappa might be globally coded as 1990s nostalgia, but in Tunisia, it’s doing some of the most culturally specific work on the continent. Depth here comes from specificity, not scale.

Adidas’s relationship with North Africa is more complicated. The brand built something deeply embedded in Egypt through infrastructure and longevity, but embedded doesn’t always mean culturally invested. Its Morocco kits between 2012 and 2019 were widely criticised for feeling generic. Algeria’s AFCON 2025 kit drew beautifully from the karakou – one of the country’s most recognisable garments – but Algeria didn’t qualify for 2026. What’s striking is that adidas still holds the official FIFA partnership through 2030: the match ball, the tournament branding, the broadcast boards. They’ll be the most visible brand at a World Cup hosted by a country whose kit they lost to Puma in 2019. Visibility without care starts to look like its own kind of absence. Infrastructure can secure presence, but not necessarily meaning.

Then there’s Nike. The world’s largest sportswear brand has no national team partnerships across North Africa or the Arab world – not Morocco, Egypt, Algeria or Tunisia. Its African football strategy effectively begins and ends with Nigeria. And the 2026 kit, released last month, shows what that singular focus can produce. The away shirt – pulling from motocross aesthetics and Afrobeats energy – is already being framed as a future classic. Nigeria didn’t even qualify for this summer’s tournament, but that almost doesn’t matter. Nike has built something that travels: cultural objects that exist beyond football. That’s what long-term, concentrated investment in one relationship can yield. Focus, here, becomes a strategy in itself.

2030 will inevitably draw new brands into North Africa – some for the first time, others more seriously than before. Many will produce beautiful kits for a four-year cycle and move on. The ones that endure will be those who understood, long before the bid, before the semi-final run, before the cameras arrived, that this isn’t just a market. It’s a culture where football doesn’t sit neatly as a product category.

Growing up in North Africa, football was something you felt in your body. Men gathered in cafés over shisha and black tea, eyes fixed on a single flickering screen. The street erupting – horns, shouting, movement – when a goal went in. My dad yelling at us for walking in front of the TV mid-match. Kids playing with a scuffed ball between makeshift goalposts on every street, in every neighbourhood. Football wasn’t leisure. It was infrastructure. It’s this everyday intimacy that exposes the gap between surface-level visibility and lived presence.

Commission designers from the culture, not just inspired by it. Meet the diaspora before you meet the stadium. Understand that Morocco is not Egypt is not Tunisia is not Algeria – each has its own visual language, its own relationship to the game. Treating the region as a monolith is the quickest way to irrelevance. And understand the difference between holding infrastructure and holding a relationship. adidas might have the match ball, but Puma, right now, has the story.