Crystal Palace have spent the better part of a year quietly building one of the most concentrated Moroccan contingents at any Premier League club, a pattern that has accelerated sharply in the final days of this summer's transfer window.
The south London club already has Barcelona-trained defender Chadi Riad, signed in 2024 on a long-term deal running to 2029, and has spent the past two weeks separately pursuing three more Moroccan internationals, the 18-year-old Union Touarga defender Taha Majni, Stade Rennais center-back Abdelhamid Aït Boudlal, and AS Roma midfielder Neil El Aynaoui. Should even two of the three close before the window shuts, Palace would field one of the largest Moroccan groupings assembled by a single European club outside Morocco's traditional recruiting markets in Spain and France.
The furthest along of the three is said to be Majni. Africa Foot reports that Palace scouts have taken the 18-year-old through physical and medical tests. The Morocco Under-20 World Cup winner has made two appearances for the Under-23s and has been in the first-team squad at Union Touarga since July 2025. The Rabat club recently extended his contract by five years, but that has done little to dissuade Palace, who are instead said to be negotiating directly with the club to iron out the details. Majni is valued at €500,000 by Transfermarkt, but would almost certainly be worth far more were a deal to materialise given the price English clubs have previously been willing to pay for young Moroccan centre-backs.
Aït Boudlal and El Aynaoui are of an altogether different profile of target, both being established senior players. Aït Boudlal is a 20-year-old who broke into the first team of Stade Rennais last season, making 21 appearances with two goals and an assist. The player is a graduate of the Mohammed VI Football Academy, and the same academy produced Nayef Aguerd, Youssef En-Nesyri and Azzedine Ounahi.
El Aynaoui meanwhile joined Roma from RC Lens last summer, and operates in central midfield, a position of need at Palace after a turbulent opening to the season under new manager Pierre Sage, who took charge of his first league game away to Everton and lost 2-0. Both are open to the move, per French outlet Foot Mercato, as Palace chairman makes new deadline pressure to add reinforcements with uncertainty over the future of Ismaïla Sarr and Jean-Philippe Mateta.
It is worth noting that Palace's interest in Morocco is not new. Palace were previously connected to midfielder Bilal El Khannouss, a player who has only grown in value as Morocco achieved new heights in the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations, which they hosted at home in December and January, and this summer at the World Cup. That run to the quarter-finals of that tournament, Morocco were beaten 2-0 by France, has had the same effect as the 2022 World Cup semi-final appearance four years prior: individual performances turning into a scouting reference point that European recruitment departments return to for months and years, not just in the transfer window immediately after the tournament.
The scale of that shift can be seen in numbers beyond Palace, of course. Morocco has become one of the most heavily represented foreign nationalities in La Liga in recent years, trailing only the traditional recruiting pipelines that have long fed Spanish football. The Mohammed VI Football Academy, established in Salé in 2009, has become the institutional backbone of that pipeline, and produced the generation of players who have moved through its ranks before signing for clubs across France, Spain, Belgium and, increasingly, England. Aït Boudlal's route, academy to Ligue 1 to reported Premier League move, follows very closely a number of his academy contemporaries who have already made that journey.
Morocco's federation has also been busy on a second front entirely distinct from club-level scouting: A flurry of nationality switches by young players developed in other European countries. In a 13-day period earlier this year, six Belgian- and Dutch-developed players, including Ajax's Rayane Bounida, who has since been called up for senior friendlies against Ecuador and Paraguay, gave up eligibility for their countries of development to represent Morocco instead. Taken together with the academy pipeline and the current wave of transfer interest, it points to a talent strategy operating on multiple tracks simultaneously: developing players domestically, recruiting dual nationals abroad, and now seeing that talent command increasingly serious money once it reaches the biggest leagues.
That last point is where the numbers have moved fastest. Achraf Hakimi's move from Inter Milan to Paris Saint-Germain last year, for around €68m, was a record for a Moroccan player; it held for four years, until this month, when Manchester City confirmed the signing of 18-year-old Lille midfielder Ayyoub Bouaddi in a €100m (£86m) deal. He is now not only the most expensive teenager in Premier League history, but the most expensive Moroccan and Arab player ever to change clubs.
Bouaddi's rise, like Bilal El Khannouss's before him and like the current interest in Aït Boudlal and El Aynaoui, traces directly back to a series of standout performances at a major tournament, in his case Morocco's run at this year's World Cup, and in particular a composed display against Brazil in the group stage that City's own director of football, Hugo Viana, later cited as part of the club's decision-making.
None of Palace's trio of reported deals are yet confirmed, and Majni's reported medical is no guarantee a deal will follow, Union Touarga's recent five-year contract extension gives the Moroccan club considerable leverage to hold out for a higher fee. But even as speculation, the volume of interest in one club, coming within days of Bouaddi's record move and building on a year-long trend that already includes Riad and the earlier pursuit of El Khannouss, points to Premier League recruitment departments now viewing Moroccan football less as a market to opportunistically raid and more as a pipeline to maintain year-round relationships with.
