Faten Ben Omar El Azizi Dreamed of Europe, Then Drowned in a Mass Crossing to Ceuta

Football was the life Faten Ben Omar El Azizi had wanted. She had long played in Morocco’s regional league for Maghreb Atlético Tetuán, whose striking kit replicates the colours of the famous Spanish club Atlético Madrid. And in the cruellest of ironies, on the day that she drowned last month, one of nearly 150 people who died in the illegal mass crossing into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, her mother was told that her daughter had just been granted a visa to go to Spain.

El Azizi loved training, says her coach: Tuesdays on the pitch and Thursday at the beach, near the city of Tétouan in northern Morocco, where the 26-year-old lived with her mother and the rest of her family. But making a living from playing in a women’s football league in Morocco had proved impossible for El Azizi. She received only a small payment of about 260 dirham (£21) when her team won and nothing when it lost – not enough to support her mother, two siblings and other relatives.