Egyptians are crazy about football, and I mean crazy crazy. They’re all about their football teams and rightfully so! Egyptians are good at football after all and it’s the main sport in the country.
Remember the famous football player in Liverpool Mohammad Salah? Yeah, well he’s actually originally Egyptian! He is even considered as one of the best players in the world and is known for his finishing, speed and dribbling.
There are even more famous Egyptian football players in the world such as Mohamed Elneny, Mohamed Aboutrika and Ahmed El Mohamady. Mohamed El Neny himself plays in Arsenal F.C. which is a team based in London, England.
The point is, Egypt has a lot of big shot players!
This is pretty common in North Africa since Algeria is great at football. There are also a lot of football players of Algerian background in famous football teams. Riyad Mahrez, a famous Manchester United player, is an Algerian French who plays as a winger at Premier League club. There are so many more interesting football players of Arab origin.
But enough about that now. Let’s talk about the football teams in Egypt and how almost every Egyptian is either a supporter of Al-Ahly or a supporter of Zamalek. Both these two teams are based in the capital Cairo and they’re the most popular teams. They also compete in the Egyptian Premier League. But hey, there’s even more teams! El-Masry, Ismaily, El-Etihad, and Pyramids FC are also popular teams in Egypt. I don’t know about you but that’s a lot of football teams in one country! I mean they even have their own league from how popular it is!
The Egyptians Premier League usually has 18 teams playing. Egypt qualifies for different types of leagues such as African Cup of Nations, All-Africa Games, Afro-Asian Cup of Nations, Nile Basin Tournament, and FIFA Arab Cup.
Those are a lot of different games and Egypt does pretty well in them.
In fact, they are the most successful team in African Cup of Nations, and come in as either runner ups or winners on the regular for all these different cups. Wow, Egypt really takes its’ football games seriously! But hey, as I said, RIGHTFULLY so!
They have around 27 stadiums so they actually hosted 5 different African Cups over the years, the two most recent ones were in 2006 and 2019. They also hosted a U-17 and U-20 World Cups in 1997 and in 2009, respectively. in 1992, Egypt won the FIFA Arab Cup hosted in Syria where they went against Saudi Arabia and won 3-2.
Let’s go back to Egyptian football teams. The Egyptian Premier League has had two football clubs in every season since its’ inception which are Al Zamalek and Al Ahly. However, Al Masry and Al Ittihad have only been absent in two seasons from the league. With Zamalek and Al Ahly neck to neck all the time, not many other teams have won as much as them. Al Ahly has won 42 times and Zamalek has won 12 times. Meanwhile, Ismaily has won 3 times and came in third plenty times!
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