Buried deep in a Málaga newspaper archive there’s a photo that, because of a marginal detail, has turned out to have a longer than expected shelf life. It was a routine shot from a good weekend for Málaga in the 2011-12 season, featuring the post-goal celebration of two charismatic playmakers, Santi Cazorla and Isco. This was Málaga’s Icarus phase, when wild executive overspending carried the club briefly into the Champions League before everything fell to earth.
The curiosity in the picture is a child in the background, Brahim Abdelkader Díaz. He’s in frame as a ballboy, 12 years old and already a top pupil at the academy in this, his native city. He’s small, barely peeping over an advertising hoarding and there’s a sweet smile on his face. If you wanted to put a retrospective lacquer on the image, you might see in his eyes a vision of his own future, doing what the nimble Cazorla and Isco do. Or even better: a future that delivers a Premier League, a Serie A and a Liga title all by the age of 21; and a designation as superstar of the host nation at a World Cup when he’s 30.
The precocious collection of domestic prizes is part of a tally that continues to grow. Brahim — as he prefers to be known — should, before his 25th birthday, add a second Liga title to his haul of medals with top-of-the table Real Madrid. In January he played a decisive part in claiming the Spanish Super Cup and, if Real overcome one of his previous employers, Manchester City, in their Champions League quarter-final this week and next, a first European Cup will feel within reach. Brahim is developing useful habits in that competition, his virtuoso goal away to RB Leipzig in the previous round putting Real into the last eight, his match-winner against Tottenham Hotspur in 2022-23 the springboard for AC Milan’s run to the semi-finals.
Last summer, a little obscured by the fanfare around Jude Bellingham’s arrival at the Bernabéu, Brahim rejoined Real after three seasons on loan at Milan, his ambition of making greater contributions to the Real first team than he had to their Liga-winning 2019-20 season — five starts, one goal, two assists — clear and respected by Carlo Ancelotti, the Real head coach. Where 24-year-old Brahim now ranks in Ancelotti’s hierarchy is probably 11th or 12th name on the teamsheet. He’s had a good 2024 and should be involved against City.
Off the pitch he’s had a big year too, with much of Spain learning that since he first left the country, talent-spotted by City in 2015, Brahim has become not only a fine collector of medals and a high-class No 10, but a shrewd, determined strategist. While he was zig-zagging from the most successful English club of the past decade to a renascent, appreciative Milan, and to and from Real, he was also at the centre of a long-running joust over his international future, being eligible for Spain and, through his father’s family, for Morocco. With the former, he won caps at most age-group levels; last month he finally declared he would answer the eager pursuit by Morocco, the 2022 World Cup semi-finalists.
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Spain may come to regret not lobbying harder for Brahim. He played a single friendly for their senior side in 2021, when a raft of under-21s were called up during an outbreak of Covid, but did not add to that cap when his form for Milan was making a strong case for another call-up. He was by then pausing on Morocco’s entreaties, and because the dilemma became prolonged and quite public, some within the Spanish federation took him to be using the tug-of-war as a threat: pick me or lose me.
Brahim and his advisers, who include his father, insisted his long delay over the decision was nothing of the sort. “I never put pressure on to play for Spain and would never do so,” Brahim felt obliged to say before his Morocco debut last month, an event preceded by a VIP reception for him in Rabat.
The vista ahead, now that Brahim has closed the door — if not practically because he has yet to play a competitive game for Morocco, then realistically — is appealing. Walid Regragui, Morocco’s head coach, barely needed to point out to Brahim that the “Atlas Lions” are on the up, that they knocked Spain out of the Qatar World Cup, and that there has been a steady stream of dual-national players choosing Morocco over European countries they represented at age-group level, a switch allowed under Fifa rules.
Regragui could also explain Morocco’s blip at this year’s Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) — a last-16 exit — was down to the lack of a fit creative No 10, precisely the role Brahim can fill for the next ten years. It’s a very good decade to be Morocco’s star player: the country will stage the next Afcon; it will also co-host the 2030 World Cup.
Seen through the eyes of that 12-year-old ballboy, it’s all quite a journey. The chapter Brahim reflects on this Tuesday, with City at the Bernabéu, was no less formative than the maturing in Milan or Real or the red-carpet treatment in Morocco. Brahim was in Manchester until he was 19, Real paying City about £15.5 million for him. He told the broadcaster Movistar that he feels grateful to Pep Guardiola for having given him his senior professional debut there even if there were only 14 more first-team outings in the next 2½ seasons.
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“Guardiola made me understand a lot of things,” Brahim said of the City manager, describing himself as “street footballer” by instinct, a more complete player thanks to learning in Italy’s Serie A and at City, where he had gifted contemporaries alongside him in the queue for first-team minutes. Jadon Sancho was a team-mate in youth teams, as was Phil Foden.
This week, all three congregate in the capital of Spain, Foden as standard-bearer of City’s academy and, at 23, in the form of his life. Sancho will be at Atletico Madrid playing for Borussia Dortmund, whom he rejoined in January on loan from Manchester United to reboot a career that has known its impatient moments, not least when he tired, as a 17-year-old, of his scant call-ups to City’s first-team squad and first joined Dortmund. That made Sancho much the most intrepid of his City cohort — at least until Brahim set about gathering his diverse set of medals and his array of international caps.
