Mohamed Ouahbi

Mohamed Ouahbi’s path to the Morocco senior job is unlike that of almost any coach at the tournament. Born 7 September 1976 in the Cité des Ânes district of Schaerbeek, Brussels — to a family from Nador in northern Morocco — he started coaching at 21, taking youth teams at Maccabi Brussels in 1997. He then spent seventeen years inside the RSC Anderlecht academy, working across age groups and contributing to the development of players who would later reach top European leagues. It is a CV deliberately built away from the spotlight, and one that did not appear destined for a senior national role.

The pivot came in March 2022, when Royal Moroccan Football Federation president Fouzi Lekjaa appointed Ouahbi as head coach of Morocco’s U-20 national team. The bet paid off historically: Morocco U-20 won the 2025 FIFA U-20 World Cup in Chile in October of that year — the country’s first global title at any level, and the spark that put Ouahbi’s name on the federation’s emergency-replacement list when senior-team turbulence followed.

That turbulence arrived faster than expected. On 5 March 2026, three days after Morocco lost the AFCON final 1-0 to Senegal in Rabat on home soil, Walid Regragui — the architect of the 2022 World Cup semifinal run — resigned. The federation, with the World Cup itself only fourteen weeks away, turned to Ouahbi. He had never managed a senior side, let alone a national team headed for a World Cup. But Lekjaa’s logic was that the U-20 generation Ouahbi had just won the world title with was already being fed into the senior squad, and that continuity of voice mattered more than senior-team CV at this stage. Sixteen of the 26-man World Cup squad announced on 26 May are new faces compared to Qatar 2022.

His approach has been pragmatic. Hakimi, Bounou, Aguerd, Amrabat, Mazraoui, and El Kaabi — the spine of the 2022 squad — were all retained. The 4-3-3 shape, the mid-block defensive principles, and the Hakimi-narrows-against-elite-wingers wrinkle that Regragui used against Mbappé in the semifinal have all been preserved. What changes is the front line: En-Nesyri, Ziyech, and Boufal — all three 2022 heroes — are out, replaced by Brahim Díaz, Chemsdine Talbi (Sunderland), Abde Ezzalzouli (Real Betis), and others from Ouahbi’s U-20 pipeline. The stakes are high — Morocco are no longer a surprise, and the 2022 ceiling is now an expectation — but the federation’s bet is that the youngest coach at the tournament, working with the players he developed, can compress months of senior-team preparation into a winning fourteen weeks.