If the question was to be asked who was the best performing Asian player in Ligue 1 last season, your mind might automatically go to PSG’s Lee Kang-in.
Of course, he scored three and had four assists in a team that won the league title, not to mention the UEFA Champions League.
You might even think of Saud Abdulhamid, who finished the season in fine style for RC Lens, or Takumi Minamino who sadly had his season cut short by a cruciate ligament injury in December, but was flying for AS Monaco before that.
If you’re from Indonesia, you might patriotically say Calvin Verdonk at Lille.
Who you might not say, and who is the correct answer to the question, is Mousa Al-Tamari.
Staggeringly, even the AI results of a Google search for “Asian players in Ligue 1” fails to mention Mousa Al-Tamari.
Yet, despite his criminally low profile, the Jordanian star – let’s never, ever again refer to him as the Jordanian Messi – arrives in North America for his maiden FIFA World Cup on the back of a career best season for Stade Rennais, or Rennes as they are otherwise known.
With six goals, including one goal of the year contender, and six assists, he finished the season third for Rennes on the goals chart, first for assists and second for goal contributions behind only Esteban Lepaul, who won the league’s Golden Boot and was one of the players of the season across the entire league.
Asked to play multiple positions across the season, from right wing-back, to winger and even shadow striker, first under Habib Beye and then Franck Haise, Al-Tamari established himself as a key figure in a side that secured qualification for the Europa League.
“Al-Tamari is very much part of Rennes’ core,” France-based journalist, and host of the French Football Show, Matt Spiro, told The Asian Game ahead of the FIFA World Cup.
“He’s an undisputed starting player, and a fundamental part of the way they play under Franck Haise with this 4-4-2 with Le Paul and (Breel) Embolo playing through the middle, two players who thrive on crosses.
“Al-Tamari has established himself as a key man, probably one of the six or seven names that go down automatically now for Franck Haise, I think.”
It wasn’t always that way, however. At the start of the season, he was forced to cover the absence of other players in unfamiliar roles, such as right wing-back, a position that Beye conceded didn’t play to his strengths.
“When he was on the right side… we saw a lot of limitations in his primary quality, which is speed, since he often cut inside onto his left foot,” Beye, a former Senegalese international, said during the season.
“His greatest quality as a player is being ‘supersonic’ in terms of speed. There are few players who can contain him in that respect. He has the profile of a disruptive, game-changing player who can be very interesting for our style of play. He’s a player who is extremely threatening in behind the defense, very good in one-on-one situations
While that meant he often wasn’t as impactful in his defensive duties, it was something Beye said he was willing to tolerate.
“We can’t ask him to be so impactful offensively and also be perfect defensively.”
But his lack of impact on games caused friction, not only among the fan base, but particularly within the squad.
“There was actually a big controversy around him in the mid-season when things started going really wrong at Rennes under Habib Beye”, Luke Entwistle, editor-in-chief of Get French Football News, explained to The Asian Game.
“Essentially there was reportedly a dressing room bust up, where one member of the dressing room said: ‘you only know how to go in behind and be an explosive winger and just run.’
“They basically just said, all you really do is you run and you run and you run, but you’ve not really got any technique or any end product.
“Which you can see where they were coming from, to an extent, because he does get up and down both wings a lot, and at times his finishing was found wanting, especially in that first part of the season. I think that he did turn that around in the second half.”
It’s no coincidence that his improvement, both in terms of form and output, came after he reverted him to his natural position as a winger.
“I’d say his best performance came against PSG,” Spiro said.
“The game after Habib Beye’s sacking, a lot of the Rennes players performed incredibly well in that game. They had no permanent coach, it was the reserve team coach, Sebastien Tambouret, who took charge, and Rennes beat PSG 3-1.
“Mousa scored, if I’m not mistaken, the first goal. There was a counter attack, and at Al-Tamari he ran at (Willian) Pacho, and his finish was absolutely brilliant from outside the box.
“It was an amazing night, actually, at Roazhon Park, (the) atmosphere was incredible, and I think there was a bit of a release of pressure, all that tension in the latter stages of Habib Beye’s reign had disappeared, and a lot of players who had been either criticized or on the fringes during that time, like Mousa Al-Tamari, they played brilliantly, so that was a stand-up performance.”
It’s that kind of impact Al-Tamari will be hoping for when Jordan take to the field at the San Francisco Bay Area Stadium for their FIFA World Cup debut against Austria.
It is a moment decades in the making for Jordanian football, and one Al-Tamari has dreamed about since he was a little boy.
“Since I was young, I dreamed of making a career in football,” he said back in 2023.
“But my mother wanted me to concentrate on my studies. It is not that she did not believe in me, but she told me it would be complicated. But I held on a little, I wanted to fight and see where football could take me.”
Where it has taken him is to the top of football, both at club and international level, and having achieved so much already in his career, success at the World Cup would eclipse it all.
