One Coptic national player in 100 years — Will FIFA finally ask why?
The World Cup does something to people that little else can. For 90 minutes, it collapses every grievance a country has with itself into a single shared heartbeat. On July 7, Egypt led Argentina 2-0 with eleven minutes to go. Then it ended, in stoppage time — Argentina 3, Egypt 2. Egypt's coach, Hossam Hassan, was so convinced his team had been wronged that he made FIFA's anti-racism gesture at the referee. Millions of Egyptians felt a deep injustice.
There is a slice of the Egyptian community that has felt a different injustice for far longer: the Coptic community, roughly 10% of Egypt's population of over one hundred million. For decades, we have asked for this exclusion of Coptic players from Egypt's football clubs to simply end.
Football is the second language of Egypt, for Muslims and Copts alike. I grew up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood with no sports club nearby, so the street became our pitch. When we didn't have a ball, we made one from rolled-up socks and played until the streetlights came on.
Still in primary school, my love for football drove me to go by myself, against my parents' wishes, and join the football school at Zamalek, Egypt's second-largest club. I remember exactly how few of us shared my faith there — three Copts on the team, two named Mina and one named Mark, names that in Egypt announce your religion before you've said a word. Our coach told us football had no future for us — that we should focus on school, become pharmacists or engineers, “like your people do.” He wasn't inventing a rule. He was repeating one.
If you grow up Coptic in Egypt, this kind of thing is constant — the joke that doesn't land, the job that goes to someone else, the coach who tells you what “your people” are for. It's a problem the state has never answered for, because officially, it does not exist. There are only individual misunderstandings — or, when the story won't stay quiet, a foreign conspiracy to defame the nation abroad.
The Egyptian Football Association was founded in 1921, Africa's oldest. Since then, exactly one Copt has worn the national team's shirt: Hany Ramzy, born in Cairo to Coptic Orthodox parents. He rose through Al Ahly's youth academy into the national team by the late 1980s. Many Egyptians didn't know he was Christian until he crossed himself before a 1990 World Cup match against the Netherlands. He earned 120 caps, captained the team from 1997 to 2002 — the first Christian to do so — and became the first Egyptian in the Bundesliga.
Ahmed Hossam, known as Mido, put a number on what Ramzy's exception was covering for. In 2018, he asked how it was possible that only five Christians had played at the top level. He proposed a 10% Coptic quota to a governmental committee drafting the sports law. It was rejected by majority vote, without debate.
Two of Egypt's most powerful voices have already been asked this directly, and both declined to answer it. In a BBC interview, Hassan Shehata, the coach who won three straight Africa Cup of Nations titles, was asked why there had never been a Coptic player on his squads. He denied any discrimination and pointed to Ramzy. Pressed with “I'm asking about now,” Shehata said only: “This is up to God.” Pope Tawadros II was asked the same question in 2018. His answer: don't ask the Copts — ask the clubs.
Is it plausible that Egyptian football has produced not one Christian with a good leg who kicked a ball in the street?
The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights has documented coaches asking young Copts to convert, change their names, or find a different passion. In 2016, Coptic Solidarity, a Washington-based advocacy group, filed a formal complaint with FIFA, urging an investigation. Its follow-up report counted 25 cases since 2007 of Coptic players turned away by name alone, from Egypt's biggest clubs. The Church's solution: build its own leagues, since the state's fields made clear who wasn't welcome.
We are not asking for a quota. We are asking for something smaller: let our children be seen for what their feet can do, not their names. A single Coptic name in Egypt's next World Cup squad would be worth a decade of “this is up to God.”
FIFA has sat on this complaint since 2016. It took racism seriously once it decided to, with bans, points deductions, and empty terraces for stadiums that tolerated monkey chants. Religious exclusion deserves the same reckoning. A federation that will investigate a chant should investigate why a nation of over a hundred million has fielded one Christian player in a century.
The Christian community in the United States and across the West, in all its different denominations, should actively press Egyptian diplomatic missions to end this systematic discrimination against Copts in sports.
Mina Abdelmalak was born and raised in Egypt, where he earned a law degree from Ain Shams University. He worked as a legal researcher at the Egyptian Union of Liberal Youth (EULY), a Cairo-based nonprofit that promotes classical liberalism among Egyptian youth, where he supervised a program on the status of Coptic Christians in Egypt. He is now based in Washington, DC, where he remains active in promoting religious freedom and peacebuilding in the MENA region.
