game as a late-season substitute against
Cagliari. Then he joined Sampdoria in 2006,
but never featured.
With his football dreams partially satisfied,
Saadi hung up those barely-used boots and
embarked on lavish schemes, including a plan
to build a vast new Hong Kong-style island
for trade dealing and fun. The Gaddafis’ days
in power were numbered, however, and it all
really started in Benghazi, where Saadi stoked
the passions.
Those seeds were sown in July 2000. Saadi
was playing for Al Ahli (from Tripoli) while
also running the FA, so bitter rivals Al-Ahly
(Benghazi) were regularly enraged about
rigged refereeing. Finally, after a relegation
decider went south, protests erupted, with
one featuring a donkey donning a Saadi shirt.
That ass triggered the Gaddafis, who began
a savage crackdown: Al-Ahly’s headquarters
and training facilities were bulldozed, as kids
were forced to cheer the destruction.
The club received an indefinate ban which
lasted for five years, then eventually given
land on which to rebuild – an empty gesture,
with no funding. Resentment grew. By 2011,
as the Arab Spring simmered, Saadi bizarrely
pitched up in Benghazi. Whether an effort to
make peace or to brief the military, it didn’t
work. His security force fired on protestors,
pouring fuel on an already-combustible public
mood. Months later, the Gaddafis were gone.
What happened to the team that regime
tormented? “Al-Ahly Benghazi lost everything
20 years ago,” explains the excellent news
account, LibyanFootball. “Today, they’re the
third-biggest club in Libya, after Al-Ittihad
and Al Ahli Tripoli. They’re the most popular
team in the eastern region of the country.
There’s now a training complex for the club
and they play games at the 10,500-capacity
Benina Martyrs Stadium, which is owned by
the municipality of Benghazi.”
The game will prevail. Elsewhere, though,
the demise of the dictatorship proved to be
a double-edged sword for Libyan footballers
at home and abroad.Football likes a grand symbolic gesture. In
2011 – the same year that Libya reverted to
its first post-independence flag, replacing an
all-green affair that for 35 years had been
the world’s solitary single-colour national
flag – the Libyan Football Federation returned
its team to pre-Gaddafi colours: red, black
and green, abandoning Muammar’s favoured
green (or the blue he supposedly suggested
after Everton’s visit).
Then they went scouting. In Manchester.
“It wasn’t long after the uprising – I think
someone in the federation contacted my dad
first,” reveals Libya’s recent captain, Ahmad
Benali. “My dad’s Libyan, so he was buzzing.”
Benali is an unsung export. Released by
Manchester City in 2012 after a loan spell at
Rochdale, the Mancunian midfielder has had
a solid career in Italy with Brescia, Pescara
and now as captain of Crotone. They’re back
in Serie B, relegated in 2020-21 despite the
mid-season intervention of one Serse Cosmi.
Benali was the second Libya skipper to play
for Cosmi, having been given the honour and
armband in 2019 (“It’s probably my greatest
achievement”), and yet he has never played
there. “All of our home games were in Egypt,
Algeria, Tunisia,” he says. “It’s never easy.”
Civil war came to Libya following Gaddafi’s
removal in 2011, but Benali says the national
team’s difficulties aren’t entirely due to that
particular instability; he worked under “eight“HE WAS A BILLIOnAIRE, BUT
STILL WAnTED TO COME AnD
TRAIn EVERY DAY – AnD I DID
MEET MY WIFE THROUGH HIM!”
Left From the
training ground
to the Venice
Film Festival and
diplomacy visits,
Saadi kept busy
Below He was
‘devastated’ to
see Juve clinch
the Italian Super
Cup when Libya
hosted in 2002...SAADI
GADDAFI