Journalist Leyla Hamed Finds Her Voice in Football's Human Stories

Morocco was different. Her Darija, a colloquial Arabic, was “broken,” and her accent gave her away. But belonging wasn’t treated as something you had to win. “They’d be like, ‘You’re a sister. You belong here.’” Over time, she says, she felt herself leaning toward Morocco, not because Spain wasn’t home but because it kept demanding proof.

Today, Hamed works within football’s backstage—news conferences, mixed zones and the quiet press boxes where stories are written as matches unfold below.

As a Moroccan Spanish journalist covering the game, she has built a voice in a sport whose media culture still skews overwhelmingly male. The stories that interest her most are rarely just about tactics or results. They are about belonging: who gets to be inside football’s rooms and whose voices frame the way the game is understood.

Those stories are shaped in part by a childhood that coincided with the early 2000s era of Real Madrid’s “Galácticos,” when the club filled its squad with global stars like Luís Figo and Ronaldo Nazário.

One signing in particular stayed with her: Zinedine Zidane.

Zidane arrived at Real Madrid as one of the biggest stars in the world, but for Hamed the significance ran deeper. The son of Algerian immigrants to France, he carried North African heritage into the center of European football—something rarely visible on television screens at the time.

“For the first time,” she says, “I saw someone from our community represented.”

Some of her other vivid memories of football come from her annual visits to family in Tétouan and Tangiers.

It was here that she watched neighborhood Ramadan tournaments. Makeshift teams formed on dusty pitches. Families gathered in plastic chairs to watch the games unfold before sunset.

“You could spend the whole day there,” Hamed remembers.

Children perched on walls watching older players compete. The atmosphere built through the afternoon until the call to prayer echoed and everyone went home to break the fast.

“It was entertainment for hours,” she says. “Everyone was so into the game.”

Those experiences of “feeling football” unfold within communities rather than in stadiums shaped how Hamed would later understand the sport.

At 16, a health scare paved the way for her first foray into football commentary. After months of unexplained exhaustion, Hamed collapsed at home; a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes followed. She spent almost a month in the hospital, where a television in her room aired football channels from around the world— England’s Premier League, Italy’s Serie A, Spain’s La Liga. She studied the sport for hours a day: the matches, the commentary, the analysis. “Football became my refuge,” she says.

It was during that period that she realized she didn’t have to play professionally to stay inside the sport. She could write about it. Her first newsroom was Twitter (now X).

Hamed began translating Spanish football news into English, teaching herself the language through football broadcasts, films and music.

By 17, she had built an audience of 15,000 followers—enough to convince her that football journalism might actually be possible.

“It meant so much,” she says, “because I was just a teenager behind a screen, and people were choosing to read what I wrote.”

With her defiant personality, she convinced her parents that studying biology or law wasn’t for her. Instead, she enrolled in journalism classes at Madrid University, before completing a master’s degree in football communications at the Real Madrid Graduate School–Universidad Europea, a specialized institution affiliated with the football club.

Her early professional break came in 2010, when Qatar bought Malaga FC, and Hamed would manage the club’s social media channels while learning more about the football world’s inner machinery.

Finding her Footing

The mixed zone after a match is rarely glamorous.

It’s a narrow corridor filled with microphones, camera cables and journalists leaning forward with recorders. Players pass through quickly, answering questions while still breathing heavily from the game.

The first time Hamed stood there during a Málaga-Barcelona match, Lionel Messi walked past.

“I was nervous,” she says. “I was starstruck.” Hamed laughs at the internet’s expectation that everyone plays it cool now—influencers meeting players like it’s nothing—but she couldn’t. She had idolized him on screen for years. If she’d been able to ask a question, she says it wouldn’t have been tactical. It would have been emotional: a plea for the player to understand what his football gave to people watching from hard places. “You can make a person who is feeling really down feel so excited watching you play,” she says.

But the biggest growth, she says, came when she stopped treating football as sealed off from the world. Hamed says it’s important to widen the frame so that people who live inside football—players, fans, families—are allowed to be fully human.

That philosophy comes through most clearly in the stories she tells about players from the Middle East and North Africa. Too often, she says, they’re approached only through conflict: what it’s like to represent a nation under strain, what it’s like to play with tragedy at home. Those questions matter, but they can become a trap. “Sometimes these players never get to speak about their dreams … or just easy talk—what food do you like, what music do you like, travel, lifestyle.” She wants to give them that space too.

It’s also why she’s drawn increasingly to Morocco—not just the national team but local football culture. In April 2025, she attended the Casablanca derby between Raja and Wydad, one of African football’s most intense rivalries.

Green and red smoke, representing the clubs’ colors, filled the air outside the stadium. Inside, thousands of voices rose in Darija chants that echoed through the stands.

This time she understood every word. “That was special,” she says.

For someone who spent much of her childhood explaining where she belonged, it felt like football had answered the question.

Gratitude, Defiance and Hope

At the 2022 World Cup, Morocco beat Spain, and in the knot of her own identity, Hamed felt both gratitude and defiance.