Teenage kicks: Aznou, Ben Seghir and the young stars making their mark for Mena nations

Eighteen years old, on your first call-up for a senior national team, it’s hard to disguise those feelings of awe at the occasion. When Ahmad El Msmari made his way out on to the playing area as one of Libya’s substitutes for their Africa Cup of Nations qualifier in Nigeria last month, photographers captured him eagerly grabbing a word with the opposition winger Samuel Chukwueze. El Msmari looked utterly starry-eyed at the opportunity to simply share space with the AC Milan star. No wonder. El Msmari only turns 19 next year. His last few months of adolescence have been a breathless rush of career promotions. At the beginning of the summer he was an apprentice striker at Rayo Vallecano, the suburban club in his native Madrid. Barcelona signed him in August, enrolling him in the junior ranks at their fabled La Masia academy. It’s an especially inspiring place at the moment, with graduates like Lamine Yamal , still only 17, excelling in senior football alongside a number of young homegrowns in Barca’s Liga-leading team. El Msmari, who has Libyan parentage, is still a few rungs down the Barcelona ladder. He’s playing with the club’s ‘Juvenil’ side, teenagers several tiers below the seniors or reserves. Yet he’s already been part of a senior Libya squad nurturing ambitions to reach the 2026 World Cup , and last week led the forward line for Libya’s under 20s. He’s part of a trend, a pronounced one across several Maghreb national teams and indeed the wider Mena region, of fast-track acceleration to senior international selection for the prodigiously talented or, simply, for the potentially prodigious. Last week, Bahrain had a 16-year-old on their bench for their World Cup qualifying matches and he, Sayed Al Wadaei, would have been forgiven for looking on wide-eyed at the drama playing out in front of him as his country drew 2-2 with Australia. It was a topsy-turvy fixture featuring Australian goals in the first and 96th minutes and an outcome that left unheralded Bahrain’s World Cup hopes still very much alive. In the same round of Asian qualifiers, there was a less happy result for Qatar’s teen prospect, Ibrahim Al Hassan, on the wing for the side beaten handsomely by a UAE team who, for their part, had 19-year-old Junior Ndiaye on the bench. Al Hassan will have many more battles to fight. He’s only just turned 19 and already has two international goals to his name. Morocco’s Adam Aznou, 18, was meanwhile busy adding to his tally of senior caps, providing his first international assist in his third outing for the Atlas Lions. He returned from Monday’s 7-0 thrashing of Lesotho in Afcon qualifying to his club, Bayern Munich, impatient to start accumulating more minutes – he has only 10 so far in senior club football – of Bundesliga action to his CV. He will not wait for long. Aznou is a hot property and, with his La Masia background, an exemplar for the likes of Libya’s El Msmari. Aznou, like Yamal, was born in Spain and has Moroccan heritage. Unlike Yamal – who elected to play for Spain – Aznou chose the North African country to represent internationally. He and Yamal are close, having come through the La Masia ranks together up until Bayern poached Aznou, identifying him as a left-back with a brilliant future and then as cover for a position that needed reinforcement when the experienced Moroccan Noussair Mazraoui joined Manchester United in the summer. With Bayern’s first-choice left-back Alphonso Davies exploring possible opportunities elsewhere, the position may soon be there for the permanent claiming. “We think very highly of Adam,” said Bayern’s director of football Max Eberl, after Aznou made his Bundesliga debut as a substitute three weeks ago. That his full national team debut, in October, preceded his first senior club appearance, is unusual but speaks for his country’s belief in him. “Picking him has advanced his adaption to the group,” explained Walid Regragui, Morocco’s manager, “and it shows the confidence we have in him”. The show of belief is also strategic. Young dual-nationals, such as the Spanish-Moroccan Aznou are permitted, under Fifa rules, to switch their international registration until they have played three senior competitive internationals. Aznou was on Spain’s radar enough to have been capped at junior levels for the country. Regragui now has him fully on board with Morocco. Likewise, Algeria with Berlin-born Ibrahim Maza and Copenhagen-born Amin Chiakha, both of whom have made their Algeria debuts this autumn, both aged 18. Maza, whose father is Algerian and his mother Vietnamese, had previous played age-group football for his native Germany but committed his future to Algeria on being approached by Vladimir Petkovic, the Desert Foxes’ manager, who sees in the creative attacking midfielder as having “great talent, great technique and a high footballing intelligence despite his young age”. Having an idol, Riyad Mahrez, as an international teammate helped, too. “I used to watch Mahrez on television and dreamt of being able to play alongside him,” Maza told reporters when he made his Algeria debut last month. His club Hertha Berlin are currently in Germany’s second tier, but he is a transfer target for a number of top division suitors. FC Copenhagen’s Chiakha – whose father is Algerian, his mother Danish – has been widely admired since he was 16. He was top scorer in last season’s Uefa Youth League, and had represented Denmark at under-17, 18, and 19 level before joining up last week with Mahrez and Petkovic in Algiers. It has been a breakthrough few weeks for the tall centre-forward. He had scored his first two senior club goals coming off the bench for Copenhagen in a Uefa Conference League match a week before his Algeria debut, last Thursday, against Equatorial Guinea. “He’s come into the squad with a view to where we develop over the next 10 years,” said Petkovic. That period would clearly include the Afcon finals, for which Algeria qualified in comfort and which begin in 13 months. Those finals will be hosted by Morocco, whose Olympic team – mostly of players under 23 – won a bronze medal at the Paris Games in August, and gave a platform for 19-year-old Eliesse Ben Seghir to build on his already soaring reputation. The winger, born in southern France and capped by France at junior levels, made his senior debut for his club Monaco aged 17 two years ago and since receiving his first call-up from Regragui in March has scored three times and directly set up two more goals in six competitive internationals for the Atlas Lions. He plays in a position where there is fierce competition for places in the Morocco side, but so far his excellent, thrilling dribbling from the flank is yielding productive rewards. “I feel the brakes are off with the Morocco team,” said Ben Seghir of choosing the country of his heritage over France for his senior national team career. When he turns 20 in February, Ben Seghir can look back on an extraordinary initiation in international football: an Olympic medal and a 100 per cent record in his six competitive games for Regragui’s Morocco with scorelines of 2-1, 6-0, 5-0, 4-0, 5-1 and 7-0. It’s the stuff of teenage dreams.

Teenage kicks: Aznou, Ben Seghir and the young stars making their mark for Mena nations

The likes of Morocco, Algeria and Libya have been snapping up dual-nationality players from Europe with the carrot of major tournament game-time