The rise of Future FC: How a government-affiliated club took over Egyptian football

Hours after Ittihad Alex SC’s 1-0 triumph over Al-Ahly SC in the 1976 Egyptian Cup finale on the back of a goal hammered in by Talaat Youssef, Ittihad supporters swarmed Alexandria’s train station to greet their team upon their return from Cairo.

A six-year-old Adel al-Qady, who would grow up to be an Ittihad player, was among the thousands of supporters decked out in the club’s signature green shirt. As soon as the players stepped off the train, Qady raced toward his favorite player, Shehta al-Iskandarany, nicknamed the king of the midfield by the team’s fans.

“Have no fear, Shehta al-Iskandarani is here,” the crowd chanted. 

So many years later, Qady says this day is forever engraved in his memory. “This was the sixth time Ittihad won the Egyptian Cup championship. We stayed up all night celebrating in the streets of Alexandria.” 

Qady grew up in a family of hardcore Ittihad fans. Pictures of the famous players from the club’s history — Abdel Fattah al-Garem, Adel al-Bably and of course Shehta al-Iskandarani — adorned the family’s home. 

“It was my father’s dream that I would someday play for Ittihad, like the many stars who had raked in so many championships in the 60s,” Qady says. 

At the age of 10, Adel registered for the club’s junior tryouts and got accepted, fulfilling his family’s dream. 

Adel was slotted in at left wing, joining the junior team in 1980 at 10 years old. He played at the junior level until he was 17, with the team winning seven champions over that period. When he turned 18, Qady was promoted to the senior team, where he played with the club for five consecutive seasons from 1988 to 1993. He then transferred to Tram SC, another Alexandrian club, playing there until he retired at the age of 31 and returned to the Ittihad Alex stadium, but now as a supporter. 

“Since I retired, I have not missed a single Ittihad match at the stadium. I dream of seeing my team win championships again or at least compete for titles.” 

But times have changed. Last season Ittihad finished in 12th place, struggling in the last couple of matches to avoid relegation, whereas teams like Pyramids FC and Future FC have risen to the top of the league. 

This strikes Qady as odd. “We don’t know the sources of these clubs’ incomes and why they are spending so much money on players without any clear revenues.” All he knows is that “a club called Coca-Cola was recently acquired by some politicians, renamed Future and became a serious contender for championships.” 

Qady was not alone in this sentiment. Sources working in the football sector in Egypt who have spoken with Mada Masr in recent months have described the rise of a club owned by leading politicians in the Nation’s Future Party, which has close ties to authorities and holds a majority in both houses of Parliament. This club has succeeded in taking over leadership positions in national football governing bodies and attracting top players and even supporters. All of the sources agree that what has been taking place in the football scene is in violation of the rules of fair play, which usually ensure the game remains competitive and fair. 

Proposals to introduce financial fair play regulatory mechanisms were set forth by the Union of European Football Associations in 2008, with the implementation of the regulations taking place at the outset of the 2011–12 football season. It is primarily a regulatory mechanism that prevents football clubs from spending more than their set budgetary framework. The most important conditions set forth by UEFA prevent football clubs from spending more than they earn, demanding clubs reveal budgets and financing sources in detail and introducing sanctions for overspending. The goal of the regulatory framework is to prevent millionaire-owned clubs from destroying the competitive nature of football and alienating the traditional football fan base, to curb money laundering in football, to set limits on players’ pay, and to protect clubs from their own financial imprudence that might threaten their long-term survival. 

Penalties include points deduction, withholding prize money, restrictions on the number of players a club can register for UEFA competitions, bans on participating in European championships, stripping clubs of titles and relegation. 

In Egypt, everyone agrees that the failure to implement Financial Fair Play has led to an unprecedented increase in players’ pay, an increase in commission fees collected by player agents and an influx of money from unknown political sources for reasons unrelated to investment in sports, leading to the rise of clubs that have money and power. This has placed these clubs in prime position to contend for championships, while historically popular clubs face the specter of relegation due to their inability to match other clubs’ spending power. 

One of the most prominent examples of this trend is the foray of the Nation’s Future Party into football in 2019, when the Egyptian Olympic Committee agreed to a name change of Tanmeya SC, a club in the fourth division, to Nation’s Future Club.

The club’s name was changed again in April 2021 to Future Sport. Ashraf Rashad, the party’s secretary general and first vice president, assumed leadership of the club. Ahmed al-Gendy, secretary of the Senate Trade, Industry and SME Committee, was Rashad’s vice president at the club and Sayed Youssry al-Harissy, the Nation’s Future MP for Cairo’s Sayeda Zainab district, sat on the club’s board. 

Even with power and money behind them, the newly acquired club had its work cut out for it. It became clear to party leaders, after consultations with leading football officials, that acquiring a fourth-division club with the intention of seeing it rise through the ranks to the Egyptian Premier League would be a tricky and time-consuming endeavor with no guarantee of success, according to a source close to the Future FC board who has worked as a technical director for a premier league club in prior seasons. This did not sit well with the party leadership’s desire to see the club play in the league as soon as possible, the source says. Faced with this reality, the party figures decided to look into buying another club that was already headed toward promotion to the premier league: Coca-Cola FC. 

Negotiations between a businessman and another club’s director to acquire Coca-Cola FC after the club’s promotion to the top league were being broached, when party members intervened to secure their own deal, the source says. With the deal dead, Future Company for Sports Investment and Marketing — headed by Nation’s Future Senator Ahmed Diab – stepped in to acquire the club. 

According to Hossam Neinaa, who was vice president Coca Cola FC’s youth program and a confidant of the club’s president Magdy Ismail at the time, Ismail had rejected the offer from the businessman and director of a club facing relegation at the time to buy the team. He also rejected an even more lucrative offer from an Emirati investor. After that, senior figures from Future Company intervened to acquire the club, but Ismail was steadfast in his refusal to sell the club, holding on to a dream of the team playing in the premier league and repeatedly reiterating that it would be impossible for him to sell the club to Future or any other investors. 

“To our surprise at the time, the deal went through,” says Neinaa. “He probably acquiesced after being subjected to some sort of pressure.” In September 2021, Future Company announced its acquisition of the club, renaming it Future FC. 

Despite the party leadership denying their affiliation with the club, the configuration of the club’s board of directors raises some eyebrows as to the veracity of that claim. The club’s presidency was assumed by businessman Waleed Zaki, the CEO of Pioneers Holding for Financial Investments and the elder brother of Nation’s Future MPs Yasser Zaki and Hossam Zaki. Sitting on the club's board of directors are Alaa Abed, a party vice president and House Transport Committee head; Mohamed Halawa, a party Senate member; and House MPs Sharif al-Gably and Wael Tarek Ismail.

In their first season in the premier league, Future FC won the Egyptian Cup and qualified for the CAF Champions League, Africa’s most prestigious football competition, after ranking in the top four in the Egyptian Premier League. 

Some see this success to be largely a result of the enormous amount of money the club paid to acquire players. “In their first season in the league, they bought lots of players, paying enormous sums in the process. So it makes sense that they ended up in the top four and qualified for the African championship,” says Saber Eid, the football director at Ghazl al-Mahalla SC. 

For example, the club paid LE23 million to acquire Ahmed Refaat from Al Masry SC, a sum that dwarfed Refaat’s LE5 million contract with the club. The club also bought Ahmed Atef and Mohamed Reda from Wadi Degla SC to the tune of LE 18 million each when their contracts were each under LE2 million, and acquired Abd al-Kebir al-Wady for LE17 million from Semouha SC, a number far exceeding his salary of LE3 million. In the 2021 season, Future FC acquired a total 27 players, more than any other team in the league. 

Many professionals in the football sector consider Turki al-Sheikh — the current chairman of the Saudi General Authority for Entertainment and former Saudi Sports Minister with close ties to Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman — to be responsible for the trend of skyrocketing player prices in Egypt. He spent more than LE 2 billion in two seasons during his stint with Pyramids FC from 2018–2020, pushing other clubs — the ones who could afford it — to pour even more cash in to attract top players and maintain their ability to compete for titles. Ahmed Wagdy, a football agent, says this has made Egypt an attractive option for players from Europe seeking to round up their careers, as current salaries exceed those offered in some of the European leagues. For example, Gareth Bale, an ex-Real Madrid player agreed to sign with Los Angeles FC, at an annual contract of US$1.6 million, while Tunisian defender Aly Maaloul’s contract with Al-Ahly SC sees him earning $1.5 million a year. 

The current situation is enabled by the absence of any serious regulation with regard to financial fair play and player transfers.

In most countries, this responsibility falls on a professional clubs association, an organization representing clubs competing in a country’s premier league that is formed through the nomination of representatives from each club in the association. The association oversees the clubs’ budgets and implements financial fair play or similar regulations. 

However, this has not been the case in Egypt. In September 2021, the Egyptian Football Association invited clubs competing in the country’s premier league to nominate representatives from their clubs to participate in elections for the Egyptian Professional Football Clubs Association, which was formed in 2016. The football association stipulated that the nominees not be members of a club's board of directors or employed by the board in any capacity. In the ensuing elections, Ahmed Diab was elected as the head of the clubs association. Subsequently, the football association’s influence was greatly curtailed and the head of the clubs association became solely responsible for handling broadcasting rights and sponsorship deals and overseeing regulation and supervision of all financial matters pertaining to clubs in the Egyptian Premier League. 

The Youth and Sports Ministry guidelines for sports clubs outline the different criteria for eligibility candidates must meet to qualify for membership in the clubs association, according to Talal Abdel Latif, an expert on sporting guidelines. They must have either participated as a player in at least 110 first or second-division matches, achieved first-class status as a local football referee, be registered as a technical director at the national association, coached a first-division club for at least one season, or previously been a member of the board of directors of the football association or one of the clubs for a full season.

Diab meets none of these conditions.

However, this was of little consequence in the end. Diab ran and won the election becoming the association president. Emad Wahid, a former board member of Al-Ahly SC, describes the situation as “a blatant conflict of interest unparalleled in any other league in the world. The head of the football company at Future FC is also the president of the Egyptian Professionals Club Association,” making it “virtually impossible to uphold the rule of law.” 

Diab was a newcomer to professionals in the football sector, according to Wahid. 

“We had never even heard of Ahmed Diab’s football credentials when all of a sudden he assumed this important sporting position. All we knew was that he worked in industry and was a Nation’s Future Party member,” said Wahid.

Regarding Diab’s rise to the leadership of the clubs association, the source close to the board of directors at Future FC and former coach at a premier club last season says, “Certain state institutions had disputes with the football association’s tripartite commission and decided to push for Diab to take over Egyptian football. Even the way he got elected was through a state institution [which the source declined to name] sending out text messages to club presidents with strict instructions to vote for Diab for the Professionals Club Association’s presidency.” 

After securing players and taking over the association, it was time to set their sights on securing supporters. 

At the outset of the more recent football season, Adel al-Qady was stunned to find out that supporter turnout for Future FC was higher than that of his historic club, Ittihad Alex FC. “Since when does Future FC have supporters? The only advantage supporter-led clubs could rely on was a large fan turnout at the stadium. But even that is no longer the case. How could a club without a historic fan base have more supporters turn up than us?” he says. 

The reason for that, according to a number of sources, is that fans were offered cash and food in order to turn up in support of Future FC.

The cost of attending matches at stadiums has risen considerably in recent years, with ticket prices hitting LE75 per ticket and fan IDs and QR codes costing around LE100 each. As a result, many supporters are now unable to afford regular match attendance. “In-stadium football fans have historically been from the working classes. This is why we are suffering from lower turnouts,” says Karim Mohamed, an Ittihad Alex FC supporter who attended most of the previous season’s matches.

However, Future FC does not seem to have this problem. Mohamed says that the club relies on party members and local leadership in working-class districts rounding up supporters in exchange for cash or meals. 

Everybody is aware of this and some have no problem going about it publicly. The secretary for the party’s Helwan chapter announced that he was giving away free tickets to Helwan residents, without needing to register at the Tazkarti website, via his Facebook page. Ahead of a Future FC back in September, the party secretaries for Marg,  Amireya and Dar al-Salam rounded up party members to support the club at the stadium. 

"It’s common knowledge among people in football that certain businessmen buy tickets to round up supporters for Future FC,” says Saber Eid, the football head at Ghazl al-Mahalla SC. 

However, things did not stop at buying players or rounding up fans. New competitions were conjured up for Future FC to win. 

In September 2021, the clubs association unveiled the inaugural Clubs Association Cup. With the inaugural tournament to take place in the middle of an already heavily congested football season, there was a push to cancel matches for the football association’s Egyptian Cup due to scheduling clashes. However, the clubs association insisted on holding the championship and the cup, making for the longest season in the history of Egyptian football. Ghazl al-Mahalla SC and Future FC made it to the cup finals, with the latter securing the championship at a score of 5-1. 

In the beginning, the tournament was deemed unimportant, with most of the major players at the league’s two most popular clubs, Al-Ahly SC and Zamalek SC, unable to participate due to their duties with the national team. However, after Future FC won the cup, ON Sport dedicated an unusual amount of coverage extolling the competition’s significance, Ali al-Banna, a former coach at Ghazl al-Mahalla, says. 

Banna stresses how Future FC has been heavily touted by ON Sport, the channel that owns the broadcast rights for the Egyptian Premier League and a subsidiary of Presentation Sports Agency, a sports marketing agency that has sponsorship deals with most of the league’s clubs that falls under the umbrella of the intelligence-affiliated United Media Services Group. However, this does not seem too odd considering that Ahmed Shobeir, the channel’s main anchor, is also the club’s vice president.

The club’s opponents have also noticed something peculiar about how Future FC’s matches are officiated.”

"Future FC is known to be a strong team. There’s a lot of speculation among us coaches as to why the 32 matches they’ve played this season were presided over by only six different referees. It’s a bit odd,” says Banna, adding that one referee alone has presided over 10 Future FC matches. 

All of this is happening in the absence of a proper professional association and a complete lack of transparency within Egypt’s football industry.

According to Talal Abdel Latif, the sports guidelines expert, one of the pillars of implementing financial fair play regulation is to have designated companies audit all football-related activities at the club level, independently from the club’s administrative board. These companies monitor the clubs’ budgets and investigate the finances to see if budgets exceed the amount earmarked for player transfers. 

Emad Wahid, the former Al-Ahly board member, adds that even Arab leagues have a ceiling for player salaries. The football association and supporters are able to see a club’s detailed budget and how much the team is spending to acquire players.

This has not been the case in Egypt, according to Abdel Latif. The Egyptian Football Association did try to implement the law at the outset of the season, in mid-August of this year, but not a single club submitted their budgets. 

“We have been trying to implement this legislation for the last seven years, but none of the clubs have been compliant. The clubs are more powerful than the football association,” Abdel Latif says. 

Wahid, on the other hand, does not seem to think that the current football association head is capable of implementing financial fair play regulation. 

As the source close to the board of directors at Future FC and former coach at one of the Premier League clubs last season puts it, “it is our right as professionals working in the football industry to know who finances Future FC and Pyramids FC. Even if Nation’s Future Party-affiliated businessmen are funding Future FC’s player acquisitions, implementing financial fair play regulation would force clubs to reveal the amount of money they receive in donations and the financiers’ identities, thus curbing suspicions of money laundering.” 

On the other hand, Eid points out that populist clubs simply do not have the financial means to spend that kind of money in light of skyrocketing player prices and big capital’s takeover of the game. Even clubs affiliated with companies, which are slashing their budgets to adjust, are still unable to compete with clubs like Future FC in player acquisition, he adds.

In this environment, the demise of clubs like Ittihad Alex FC is not surprising. 

“A club like Future FC playing in the premier league for the first time is set to play in the African champions league and sits in the top four of the league table. The newly ascendant Pyramids FC is competing for the league title and sits at second place, ahead of even Al-Ahly SC,” says Qady. “It’s devastating for me, as a former Ittihad player and a lifelong supporter of the club, to witness a club with its longstanding history and loyal fanbase struggle to survive.”