Morocco at the Kings League: From the Nations Semi-Final to Ultra Chmicha

In the space of five months, Ilyas El Maliki went from receiving a message on stream to chairing Morocco’s national team at a tournament in Italy, setting his all-time Kick record and launching a club of his own. This is that story, step by step.

The message from Piqué

On 7 October 2024, while Ilyas was live on Kick, he received a direct message from Gerard Piqué, the former Barcelona and Spain defender who founded the Kings League. It was an official invitation to the Kings World Cup Nations in Italy, and his viewers watched his reaction in real time. The clip spread across the Arab world.

The Kings League then announced that Ilyas would preside over Morocco, the third national team confirmed for the tournament. Like the other 15 nations, Morocco would be led by a famous streamer, and that streamer was Ilyas.

The squad

The Moroccan team mixed former internationals with specialists of the small-sided game. Its players included Mbark Boussoufa, Nabil Dirar, Issam Erraki, Amine Bourkadi, Mohamed Nahiri and Zakaria Hadraf, alongside former futsal player Achraf Saoud and Mehdi Amri, a five-time panna champion. The coach was Majid El Khal. The squad arrived in Italy on 30 December 2024.

Ilyas did not travel with the team. He led Morocco’s campaign from his own Kick stream, bringing the Moroccan band Dqayqiya on air and wearing traditional Moroccan clothing for each game.

The tournament

The 2025 Kings World Cup Nations ran from 1 to 12 January 2025, with 16 national teams playing at the KL Arena in Milan and the final in Turin’s Juventus Stadium.

• Opening match: Colombia 4–1 Morocco.
• Second match: Morocco 9–2 Ukraine.
• Third match: Morocco 4–2 Japan.
• Quarter-final: Morocco 7–7 United States, Morocco won 2–1 on penalties.
• Semi-final (9 January): Colombia 2–1 Morocco.

On the day of the quarter-final, Fouzi Lekjaa, president of the Royal Moroccan Football Federation, called Ilyas, a call he later said motivated the team. During the run he also pledged $10,000 to amateur player Said Aouni, known as “Lawla Dorof”, if Morocco won the title, with the rest going to rebuilding mosques damaged by the Al Haouz earthquake and digging wells in drought-hit villages.

The semi-final against Colombia ended Morocco’s run, 2–1 at the KL Arena. Colombia went on to finish runner-up, and Brazil won the tournament.

601,000 viewers

Morocco’s run turned Ilyas’s channel into one of the biggest stages on Kick. Morocco World News reported more than 500,000 viewers on his stream of the semi-final, and Streams Charts records his all-time Kick peak at 601,000 concurrent viewers on 10 January 2025. In Streams Charts’ ranking of 2025, that was the third-highest peak of any streamer on Kick that year.

Received by the federation

On 13 January 2025, the Moroccan delegation led by Ilyas was received in Rabat by members of the Royal Moroccan Football Federation board, at a reception held with the Professional Football League. Ilyas thanked King Mohammed VI, Fouzi Lekjaa, Abdessalam Belkchour and Abdelatif Taif Maqtrid for their support, and said that Lekjaa had raised the idea of bringing the tournament to Morocco. As translated by Hespress: “God willing, the tournament will be organized in Morocco. Fouzi Lekjaa mentioned this to me.”

At the end of the month, Ilyas was named Moroccan Influencer of the Year at Les Impériales Week 2025.

Ultra Chmicha

The semi-final run earned Morocco a place at the next Kings League event. On 16 February 2025, Ilyas and Gerard Piqué announced live on Kick, in front of more than half a million viewers, that Ilyas would preside over his own club: Ultra Chmicha, the first wildcard team of the Kings World Cup Clubs 2025. It is also a name his fans use for themselves.

The tournament ran from 1 to 14 June 2025 in France. Ultra Chmicha kept Majid El Khal as coach and brought back several faces from the Nations campaign, including Mbark Boussoufa, Nabil Dirar, Issam Erraki and Achraf Saoud. The club played its first match on 1 June 2025 at the Cupra Arena in Villepinte, near Paris, losing 5–4 to PANAM All Starz.

A celebration that reached Ligue 1

The Kings League run also left a mark on professional football. Ilyas’s “violin” gesture, inspired by Chaabi music, caught on during Morocco’s tournament. On 23 February 2025, after scoring for Paris Saint-Germain at Lyon, Achraf Hakimi reproduced it, and after the match he explained it was a dedication to Ilyas.

What came next

In 2025 the Kings League partnered with SURJ Sports Investment to launch Kings League MENA, a competition for the Middle East and North Africa whose first tournament was set in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. For Morocco, the Nations run had already done something new: a team chaired by a streamer, followed live by hundreds of thousands of viewers in Darija, ended up received by the national football federation.

For the rest of his career, see the Ilyas El Maliki biography, and check whether he is live right now.