First Touch ’26 - Algeria Featuring Dean Ammi

First Touch | World Soccer · Dec 21, 2025 · 15m

Algeria might be best known to casual U.S. fans as the team on the wrong end of Landon Donovan’s “Go Go USA” moment in 2010—but the Fennec Foxes have one of the richest, most political football histories on the planet. In this World Cup Capsule, David Gass traces how the game arrived under French occupation in the late 1800s, how European settler clubs gave way to Algerian-run teams that doubled as hubs of cultural and anti-colonial resistance, and how the FLN’s exile team turned football into a weapon for independence. We relive the golden 1980s, the infamous “Disgrace of Gijón” in 1982 that…