It took around 46 minutes for the supporters of Esperance of Tunisia, numerous and fantastically noisy when circumstances demand, to fall in love all over again with a favourite maverick.
The players had just emerged from half time on the opening day of the 2024/25 league season, Esperance at home to US Tataouine, when Youcef Belaili drifted across the penalty area, left to right, and was picked out by a neat angled pass from Yan Sasse. The rest was instantly familiar. A deft check inside his marker, then a booming trivela, curled from the outside of his right boot past a helpless goalkeeper. Welcome home, the brilliant, sometimes baffling Belaili.
Esperance won 3-0, their first points towards another league title, number 34 on the club’s unmatched tally of domestic championships, and here was Belaili doing just what he used to do in the blood-and-gold jersey. It was a soothing sight because there had been some scepticism when, last summer, the Algerian winger signed for a third time with Esperance. He was 32, and looked back on a zig-zag career peppered with shortened stays at some clubs and angry disputes at a few of them. “The ‘enfant terrible’ is back,” suggested a headline in La Presse de Tunisie, wondering if a second return to Esperance might be one comeback too many.
Ten months on, heading for a Club World Cup that was in Belaili’s mind when he plotted his third stint at Esperance, the maverick has cast himself as main man in the club’s ambitions to upset the hierarchy of a group that has Chelsea and Flamengo as its favourites and to push the North Africans into the knockout phase. Belaili arrives in the USA in the form of his life, the club’s top scorer and top assister in a double-winning campaign – 34 goal-involvements in all from 24 games across competitions. In the CAF Champions League, where Esperance were narrowly eliminated in the semi-final, only Fiston Mayele, of champions Pyramids, finished with more goals than Belaili.
He is back in the Algeria national team, too, recalled in March by a head coach, Vladimir Petkovic, who began his reign by directly referencing “indiscipline” as a reason for excluding Belaili. Petkovic barely needed to cite the long history, from the ban, after testing positive for a prohibited substance that cost Belaili two years of his career in his mid-20s to the rows that led to the cancellation of his contacts at French clubs Brest and Ajaccio. There were sour endings to his stints at Al Ahli in Jeddah and Qatar SC, too. Nor was his exit from Mouloudia of Algiers, where he spearheaded a title-winning season in 2023/24, happily received there, his departure taken as evidence, in the eyes of some compatriots, of Belail’s incorrigible restlessness. His stay there lasted just one year.
This deep into his career, Belaili is stuck with that ‘difficult’ reputation, but when a player is supplying match-winning moments at such frequency, and delighting fans, a wise manager makes compromises. “He made a great impression for us,” his coach at Mouloudia, Patrice Beaumelle, told So Foot magazine. “He’s a player who lives on instinct and for challenges. But put too many restrictions on him and he won’t enjoy himself or be at his best.”
And being so clearly at his best in his club football for two full seasons now has convinced Petkovic. Last week, Belaili marked his third game since his Algeria recall – his 54th cap in all – by scoring the first goal and setting up the second in Algeria’s 2-0 win against Rwanda.
That’s fine form to be taking to the US adventure and the mark of a consistency that both challenges the well-established image of Belaili as erratic and speaks of a stability and leadership that has not been reflected elsewhere at Esperance. Notably in the dugout. There have been four head coaches in charge in 2024/25, and if none of them have doubted that Belaili should be their touchstone in attack, that high turnover gives a clue to the sorts of nervy expectation that drives Esperance club presidents.
In October Miguel Cardoso was dismissed as head coach, five months after having led Esperance to a CAF Champions League final and to the club’s 33rd national title. After the brief caretakership of Skander Kasri, Laurentiu Reghecampf lasted 24 games, invited to leave after a sequence of two wins in five. And so the wheel turned back to Maher Kanzari, twice previously an Esperance head coach. He’ll be the man in charge for the Club World Cup adventure.
Kanzari and Belaili go back all the way to the 2012/13 season, when Belaili was first making himself a hero at Esperance and the coach had his initial go aboard the club’s managerial merry-go-round. A dozen years later, Kanzari was grateful of the savvy of his Algerian wizard to push Esperance through the last stages of a tight title race, the prize sealed on the penultimate matchday. “Thanks to the experience of the players and the coaching staff, we came through a lot of challenges this season,” said Kanzari.
“This is Esperance. We have to finish on top,” added Belaili. It was his fifth Tunisian league title, to add to the 2012 medal from spell number one with the club; to the two titles, coupled with back-to-back African Champions Leagues, from his first Esperance sequel, the two seasons up until 2019, the year he also won the Africa Cup of Nations with his country.
former Mouloudia coach
But never has Belaili been so regularly effective as now with the club that keeps asking him back. Part of that is down to his slick dovetailing with Sasse, the Brazilian and his connection, along the left flank with the redoutable full-back Mohamed Amine Ben Hamida. Esperance recruited well in the winter transfer window, too, by signing Chiheb Jebali from Monastir, a creative passer and a strong alternative, delivering a dead ball, to Belaili’s set-piece skills.
Defensively, Esperance have tightened up over the two months under Kanzari’s watch. If the group that awaits them in America looks daunting, with its opening test against in-form Flamengo, it offers possibilities of progress, particularly if they can go into their last first-phase game against Chelsea having beaten Los Angeles FC, the last of the 32 qualifiers for the tournament. “We know how to make our experience in big matches count,” promised Kanzari.
