If Ghardimaou football club’s players had been there to take to the pitch last week, the Tunisian town’s stadium would have been packed with fans, many of them children, waving the teams’s blue and white colours. The club, which plays in the fourth division of the national league, was due to face the third-placed El Battan. It would not have been an easy game but Ghardimaou FC’s president, Jamil Meftahi, believes his players could have won.
The match did not take place. The club has all but ceased to exist after more than 30 of its players left the country, trying, like thousands of their compatriots, to reach Europe.
Sitting in a town centre cafe, Meftahi, an ex-player himself, scrolls through a four-page document listing the names of his former squad.
“In the last five years, we have lost 65 players,” he says. “Thirty-one since the last season and 14 since the start of the new year.” In March, he took the difficult but unavoidable decision to stop playing.
Meftahi says that, as far as he knows, most of the footballers have successfully reached France or Italy. Five were expelled by Serbia and others had departed legally with a student permit.
In 2022 alone, about 15,500 Tunisians reached the Italian coast, according to an advocacy group, Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES), in what has been described as a significant exodus blamed by human rights groups on the north African country’s high unemployment, rising inflation, financial stress and political instability.
“I don’t blame our players who decided to leave,” says Sider Miled, one of the Ghardimaou coaching team. “If I could, I would leave too. In my life here, I coached dozens of players, I made plans … and look at me now, I’m unemployed again.”
Ghardimaou is one of the oldest clubs in Tunisia, founded in 1922 by a French businessman when the country was still a protectorate. It never reached the first division, but has produced many talented players throughout its history. Miled himself coached two young players who currently play for Espérance Sportive de Tunis, one of the most popular clubs in Africa.
“This club was the pride of this city,” says Meftahi. “But you see, here in Ghardimaou the players were all volunteers, aged 17 to 22. And as they had no alternative jobs, they were forced by lack of resources to emigrate.”
Tunisians are the second-most represented nationality among asylum seekers arriving in Italy, making up more than 17% of the arrivals last year. The country’s economic crisis that drives them is having a strong impact on sport. Italian authorities reported in February the presence of a top goalkeeper, Khalil Zaouli, 19, who played for the first division team Avenir Sportif de Rejiche, among a small boat carrying dozens of Tunisians that had reached the island of Lampedusa. Avenir said he had left “due to the financial crisis facing the club, and difficult living conditions [in Tunisia]”.
Romdhane Ben Amor of FTDES said the crisis in the country had reached a profound state that was forcing more and more people out. “There is a feeling of total desperation of the whole population, whether they are graduates with skills or people without a university level education.
“They are excluded from the visa system. There is no longer the stereotype of the uneducated irregular migrant … Now there are many more minors, women, families, graduates. Some are not in a terrible economic situation, but for political reasons and lack of hope many Tunisians do not believe that the country will come out of the tunnel.”
He said the decision by the president, Kais Saied, to shut down Tunisia’s parliament and crack down on political opponents had cemented an “authoritarian drift” in the country, where just 11% participated in the last national elections.
“The political factor is the rule of law. Tunisians are not interested in the political process under Kais Saied … They don’t think that Kais Saied can change and don’t believe he can improve their reality.”
Elias Stiti, 40, the Ghardimaou head coach and a PhD student at the University of Kef, said Tunisia’s sporting crisis would, alongside its political and economic crises, have a deep impact on the future of those who stayed. “Football and sport in general is an educational, social and cultural project. Sport is not only sport, but it is a powerful weapon against drug addiction and extremism.”
An estimated 4,000–6,500 Tunisian individuals were affiliated with Islamic State at its height, and according to Tunisian authorities a cell was hiding in 2018 in the mountains around Ghardimaou.
But it is not an easy or safe journey for those who feel they have to leave. Aid groups believe hundreds if not thousands of Tunisians have died in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe. Dozens of Tunisian women are still seeking truth and justice for their sons and husbands who disappeared while attempting to reach Europe.
“I am a mother who has lost two sons, Mahdi and Hadi,” says Jalila Taamallah, from Bizerte. “They left Tunisia when they were 20 and 24. They were like twins, always together. They left Tunisia on a boat on 30 November 2019, they were six people and one of them already knew how to get from Bizerte to Mazara in Sicily. They never arrived in Mazara; their bodies were found in different parts of Sicily after several days. From the same boat, three bodies have never been found. Before crossing the sea, they both tried to get a visa: three times they were refused from France and from Sweden.”
Last week, on the Ghardimaou pitch, where the El Battan match was supposed to have been played, there were no fans, no banners, no flags. Instead, a dozen young players between 12 and 14 were grappling with a weekly training session. The under-14 and under-17 teams are the only squads left active in the club.
Meftahi watches them for a long time, in silence. Then, disconsolate, he says: “They’ll still have fun here for a while. And finally, like their brothers, friends and fathers, in a few years they’ll find themselves out of work, with no alternatives. And they too, like the others, will take to the sea aboard a small wooden boat, in search of a better future in Europe.”
