World Cup 2022, France – Morocco: teammates Giroud – Regraghi and the photo in which they are unrecognizable

One is the undisputed top coach of the 2022 World Cup. The other is the undisputed best center forward of the tournament. At first glance they have nothing in common as one is in the twilight of his football career and has won titles with AC Milan while the other has won titles with Widado in the prime of his coaching career.

Olivier Giroud and Walid Regraghi will face each other as France striker and Moroccan coach respectively in the World Cup semi-finals on Wednesday, but there’s another quality that isn’t widely known: they were teammates in France!

Giroud is a product of Grenoble’s academies, graduating in 2005 when he was promoted to the first team. Despite being 20 years old, he had not shown his talent, remaining just six times without a goal in Ligue 2. The following season, he featured in 17 league games and scored twice, a feat that was not enough to keep the club ahead of the pack worth convincing as a footballer.

In 2007-2008 he was loaned to Istres, a league below where he does well and returns to Grenoble for training in the summer of 2008 after scoring 14 goals in 33 games. Except that the team wasn’t in the same situation. In September 2007, Grenoble acquired Regraghi from Dijon. The Moroccan played at right-back and was also a key player for his new team, helping them to third place in Ligue 2 and thus promotion.

Giroud and Regraghi trained together in pre-season 2008 and even shared the same pitch at half-time in a friendly against Strasbourg. The Frenchman’s hopes of finding a place in attack in a Ligue 1 team were nil, so he joined Tours, a league below, and consequently parted ways with Regraghi, who played another season in Grenoble.

The sequel is more or less known to both of them. After two years with the Tour, Giroud was transferred to Montpellier and won the championship in his second season. The move to Arsenal FC was a logical consequence, as was his call to the national team, even though he was not quite young. His subsequent career took him to the top of world football at club and national team level, and also made history at individual level when he finished as the national team’s top scorer at the World Cup in Qatar.

Regraghi is ten years older and Grenoble was the penultimate stop of his playing career. In 2009 he returned to his homeland for Moghreb Tetouan and ended his career as a football player a few months later. In 2014 she started coaching at Union Rabat where he made a name for himself before joining Al Duhail of Qatar in 2020 and being hired by Wydad in 2021 which he led to the top of Africa. Three months before the World Cup, he gradually took charge of his country’s national team, replacing the sacked Vahid Halilhodzic, only to be back on the pitch with Giroud, albeit from a different perspective.