The Friendly That Won’t Happen

What was thought to be a big headline-maker – the Atlas Lions playing the Albiceleste – is officially down the drain. The friendly match between Morocco and Argentina during the upcoming November international window has officially been cancelled.

The Argentine Football Association (AFA) just this week confirmed that Lionel Scaloni’s team will instead head off to Luanda to face Angola on November 14 after a brief stopover in Spain for some training.

From there, they’ll stick around in Europe for the rest of the FIFA window which runs until the end of November. Not a word was said about Morocco by the AFA, which was a pretty clear signal that this match was off the table, and with it one of the friendlies of the year many fans had been really looking forward to.

Why Morocco said no

There was a lot of excitement around the idea of a Morocco vs Argentina match, but in the end it looks like negotiations between the two football federations never really took off. According to converging reports, the FRMF just couldn’t accept Argentina’s proposed financial terms, which were reportedly going to run to nearly $10 million to stage the match, and that just seemed too unreasonable to the Moroccan Federation. And understandably so.

The FRMF hasn’t said anything officially about it, but people close to the federation reckon that the decision was driven by a kind of principle, as much as by the cost. A close source to the federation in post on X that summed up the thinking: “Morocco doesn’t buy up big matches — it creates them.”

By taking a stand like that, the Moroccan football federation avoided what could have turned out to be one of the most expensive match-ups of that kind in the country’s history. What they’ve done instead is to put their priorities on long-term sporting and financial stability.

The cancellation is a bit of a disappointment for all the fans out there who were really looking forward to seeing what Achraf Hakimi and the rest of the Atlas Lions could do against Lionel Messi’s team. But it doesn’t in any way derail the Moroccan football team’s plans. The Atlas Lions have the 2025 AFCON in two months and are qualified for the 2026 World Cup campaign.

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