CR Belouizdad got the best home-grown player of the African championship for free.
By October 2020, when the Algerian champions officially completed the signing of 20-year-old Houssem Mrezigue, he had exactly zero senior appearances behind him. He grew up in the Wifak Sétif academy without playing a minute for the first team, then spent a year in the MC Alger reserves and again never played for the seniors (FootAlgerien).
Free agent, four-year contract, number 33, valued at €300k (Transfermarkt).
The convention here is to write that nobody spotted the talent. I won't write that: not a single source explains why he was let go first in Sétif and then in Algiers. We simply don't know. We only know the result – by the age of twenty he had been given away for nothing twice.
Two months later he made his debut. Two and a half years later he was the best player of a continental tournament. Six months after that he wasn't playing at all.
Three lungs
The debut came on 6 December 2020 in Benghazi: a substitute appearance in CAF Champions League qualifying against Al-Nasr, 0:2 to Belouizdad. Nine days later, his first start, against Aïn M'lila (footballdatabase). The man who put him on was Frenchman Franck Dumas, in charge from January 2020 to March 2021; Mrezigue became a regular under Serbian coach Zoran Manojlović.
There's no name in the sources for the man who found him – no scout, no sporting director. Only the fact: in his very first season he played more than forty matches and became champion of Algeria.
The peak came at CHAN 2022 – the tournament for players based in their domestic leagues, held in January–February 2023 in Algeria itself. Mrezigue took the CAF technical study group's best player award, made the team of the tournament and was man of the match in the semi-final, where Algeria thrashed Niger 5:0.
The "three lungs" thing is Algerian terrace folklore, not a medical fact, just so you know 😄 But the tournament numbers back it up: 3.1 tackles and 3.1 interceptions per 90 minutes alongside 1.9 key passes and an average rating of 7.37 on Sofascore. To jump ahead, that is still the best tournament of his career by ratings. He was destroying and creating at the same time – a rare combination, and the reason he got the award.
Zero
The loan to Portugal's Vizela was announced on 30 August 2023. In the entire season he didn't play a minute.
I won't invent a reason, but here's what the paper trail shows. As early as 16 September, two weeks after the announcement, Mrezigue was in the club's medical bulletin. On 14 November the club published a note headlined "Mrezigue já trabalha no relvado" – "Mrezigue is already working on the grass" – which also specified that he was returning after knee surgery. In early January the Algerian press wrote that coach Pacheta had no great desire to bring him back into the rotation. On 5 February 2024 the loan was cut short and he returned to Belouizdad, where on top of that he wasn't registered for the continental competition (Radio Algérienne).
A man who in February was handed the award for Africa's best player in front of a packed stadium in his own country was six months later a patient in the clinic of a club that ended that season relegated from the Portuguese Primeira. Not a single appearance. Not a single minute he could later show anyone. He didn't fail in Portugal – he never even got to play.
Mrezigue is used to winning
By the time he left for Europe Mrezigue had three consecutive Algerian titles with Belouizdad. The club sealed its eighth title on 21 August 2021 with a 4:2 win over USM Alger (that's where Ramdaoui, who had one foot in Baltika, ended up) – and Mrezigue's first professional goal came in exactly that match, in the 74th minute. The ninth came on 31 May 2022: 2:0 at home to US Biskra in a rearranged fixture, Mrezigue opened the scoring early in the second half of the first period, Khaled Bousseliou added the second. With that win Belouizdad became the first club in Algerian football history to win three championships in a row.
The club won the Algerian Cup on 5 July 2024, beating Mouloudia 1:0 in the final – the ninth trophy in its history and a record for the competition (CAF). Precision is needed here: Mrezigue played two games in that cup run on the way to the final, but didn't take the pitch in the final itself (Wikipedia). Three weeks later he left for Russia. Plus the 2021 Arab Cup with the national team. Plus the CHAN final and the best player award.
So for the first four years of his senior career he was always in teams that were favourites in their competitions. The Russian Premier League became his first long spell at a club that doesn't dominate a single match. In May 2026 Dynamo Makhachkala were saving themselves through the relegation play-offs.
Russia
The move went through on 31 July 2024 – a "long-term contract", in the club's wording; the figure of around €500k belongs to the category of insider estimates, nobody has officially confirmed it (FootAlgerien).
First season – 22 RPL matches and 2 goals. Second – 28 matches, a goal, plus seven games and a goal in the Cup. And the decisive episode: 61st minute of the second leg of the relegation play-off against Ural, the second goal, 2:0, Dynamo stay in the league.
He started talking about the future before he started scoring in decisive matches. In April 2025 Mrezigue told Match TV he might leave in the summer: "I need to improve my game, develop at big teams, why not?" He named Dynamo Moscow – "they play short passes, I like the tactics" – added Zenit and CSKA, and when asked whether he could handle Zenit's level, answered "yes, of course" (Match TV).
In Russia almost nobody wrote about it.
On 21 June 2026 the Algerian outlet Compétition got him on the phone and asked about the interest from Belouizdad, who wanted to bring their academy product home. The answer: "Honestly, right now I have no intention of returning to Algeria. I still have a lot to learn, and I want to stay abroad."
In the same conversation he listed his options himself: the club that finished fourth in the Russian league, and Levski Sofia, where his former Belouizdad teammate Akram Bouras plays. The outlet decodes fourth place as Spartak – that's the journalists' interpretation, not the player's words. The Bulgarian press adds that the asking price was around a million euros, and that too is an estimate, not a confirmed sum.
And there Mrezigue said the main thing: "My club doesn't want to let me go, the management wants to extend the contract."
What he does on the pitch
In Makhachkala it wasn't so much Mrezigue's trade that changed as his working conditions. In Algeria he played for a champion that almost always had to break the opponent open. In Russia he ended up in a team that more often had to win the ball back first. And the numbers show that change quite well.
An honest caveat is needed here: aggregators have no season-by-season advanced statistics for the Algerian league at all. So the comparison has to be between his continental seasons for Belouizdad and his Russian ones. The CAF Champions League sample is small, six matches a season, so this is simply a comparison of what's available.
What this means on the pitch.
As a destroyer he has barely changed at all. The tackles are the same, the interceptions have even dipped. The man with "three lungs" hasn't gone anywhere.
What changed is his game with the ball. At Belouizdad he was far more embedded in positional possession: almost 70 passes per 90 minutes at 86% accuracy. In Makhachkala there are almost half as many passes, the team spends far less time in calm positional possession, and accuracy drops to 73%. That's as much a characteristic of the team as of the player: he hasn't forgotten how to pass, he's stopped receiving the ball in calm situations.
The volume of dirty work, on the other hand, has grown. Duels won – from 4.24 to 7.11 per 90; aerials – more than doubled. What he was praised for at CHAN became his main job in Russia.
And there's an honest minus: 18.4 losses of possession per 90 minutes last season. He takes more risks, plays first-time under pressure more often and makes more mistakes.
Three conclusions that surprised me myself.
First: the only creative metric that grew in Russia is key passes. Almost half as many passes, but the rate of key passes rose from 0.68 to 0.97 per 90. In a team with few chances, he turned into the man for the final pass.
Second: in the single 2025/26 season Mrezigue played 2,329 minutes – more than in all three of his CAF Champions League campaigns combined. Those add up to 1,697. The "star of Africa" got the biggest volume of football of his career in a team fighting for survival.
Third: his best tournament by average rating is still not a club one, but one with the national team. CHAN 2023 – 7.37, CAF CL 22/23 – 7.20, last RPL season – 6.94. In three and a half years he hasn't surpassed his own peak.
Why this looks like Baltika's football
Baltika don't need a playmaker. They need volume in the holding zone: duels, aerials, recoveries, a readiness to run back for all ninety minutes and not switch off when the team doesn't have the ball.
Mrezigue became a player of exactly that profile not in Algeria, where he was the star of a championship-winning team, but in Russia, where he spent two years in the bottom half of the table. For Baltika that's more of a plus: they'd get not an African lad's adaptation to Russian intensity, but a player who has already been through that adaptation and signed off on it with two full seasons.
Why Makhachkala are saying "no" for now
Why the other side is digging in so hard is explained by one detail.
On 25 June 2026 Gazizov gave two comments about two different players. On Mrezigue: "One RPL club came for Mrezigue, but we refused to sell him. He's an important player for us." The same day he was asked about CSKA's and Lokomotiv's interest in defender Mohamed Azzi and a possible sale to the top six. The answer: "Nothing is impossible" (Championat).
One day, one man, two different answers. 😎
And Makhachkala aren't at all afraid of selling within the league. In the summer of 2025 the club sent two players to Akhmat at once – Kasintura and Abakar Gadzhiev, earning around €1.7m (Championat), and sold defender Paltsev to Krasnodar for €3.2m – its record sale. So it isn't about a principle of "we don't sell within the RPL".
What follows is my interpretation, not anyone's stated position. The difference between the two answers comes down to two things: the price tag and how it looks. Selling to the top five is a story about the club raising a player to the level of CSKA, Spartak, Zenit. Selling your leader to a team you'll be fighting in roughly the same part of the table, three months after saving yourselves in the play-offs, is a story about the club selling up.
So the Mrezigue negotiations should be read not as "we'll never sell" but as "haggling". But Mrezigue's contract runs out in a year, and the player himself wants to grow. What arguments are left?
