On 19 July 2020 a twenty-year-old Ayman Murid sat on the Leganés bench in a match against Real Madrid. Benzema, Ramos and Kroos were on the pitch. A few weeks earlier Leganés had bought him from the Mohammed VI Academy and signed him until 2024. The next step looked obvious — a La Liga debut.
It never happened.
Two years later Murid would tear up his contract with Leganés and return to Morocco. Three years after that he would undergo surgery for a triple facial fracture, attract Lokomotiv's interest, end up in Kaliningrad — and very nearly lose his first season at Baltika. And on 30 August 2026 he would score against Rodina. Between the bench next to Real Madrid and that goal — six years.
1. A royal graduate
Murid was born on 7 May 2000 in Casablanca. He is a graduate of the Mohammed VI Football Academy in Salé — the system that became one of the foundations of Morocco's footballing rise. At 18 Leganés took him: first Juvenil A, then the reserves — 24 matches and 2 goals — and after that two appearances for the first team in the Copa del Rey.
2. Next door to La Liga
On 23 January 2020 Murid started for the first team in the Cup against Ebro and played 58 minutes. According to AS, in Leganés's four seasons in the Primera only one other academy graduate had started for the first team before him.
He was named in La Liga squads: 26 January against Atlético (0:0) — bench; 16 July against Athletic Bilbao (2:0) — bench again; 19 July, the final round of the season, against an already-crowned Real Madrid (2:2). Incidentally, after that draw Leganés were relegated. Had they brought Murid on, they'd definitely have stayed up ️😎
He was promoted to the first team byJavier Aguirre — a coach with vast experience in Spain and with several national teams. In spring 2020 the Moroccan press wrote about Murid almost as a future national-team player. In May AS reported negotiations over buying his rights: Murid's agency, NAS Sport, also represented Youssef En-Nesyri — a graduate of the same academy, whom Leganés would later sell to Sevilla for €20m, a club-record fee. On 1 July 2020 Leganés activated the purchase option and signed him until the end of 2023/24.
3. Why Spain never happened
In autumn 2020, after the new contract, Leganés named Murid in the first-team squad four more times for Segunda matches — against Las Palmas, Lugo, Cartagena and Girona
5 November 2020 — an unexpected loan to Chabab Mohammédia (9 matches, 501 minutes). After returning, Murid plays for Leganés B in Segunda RFEF — 27 matches in 2021/22, a headed goal from a corner against Langreo, promotion. But the road to the first team had already closed.
On 29 July 2022 Leganés announce: contract terminated by mutual consent. Murid is 22, and only half of the four-year deal has been used. The club that in autumn 2020 was still naming him in four first-team squads let the player go early two years later — and never explained why.
4. Coming home
Straight away — a move to Union Touarga, newcomers to Morocco's top flight. Three seasons (2022-2025): 81 matches, 1 goal, 5 assists. Four of his five career assists at the club came in the final season (30 matches, 1 goal, 4 assists per Le Matin) — Murid earned his second European chance at the peak of his form, not on momentum. He was captain there too.
5. A Raja fan who had to apologise to his own club
After the round 4 match of the Moroccan championship against Raja Casablanca in September 2023, Murid found himself at the centre of a scandal: the Moroccan outlet Febrayer reported that on video he was reacting to the Raja fans' songs in the Curva Sud of the Mohammed V Stadium. On 28 September 2023 Murid publicly apologised to everyone at Touarga:
"I want to confirm that I respect the game, my teammates and opponents, and I will always try to present the best image of myself and the team. I never wanted and do not want to belittle the Touarga shirt."
Behind the dry career chronology stands a fan who once slipped up publicly — and apologised just as publicly. So he's a Raja supporter, then🤷♂️
6. A triple facial fracture
In the season before his move to Russia Murid was a starter and, according to InfoSports, played every league match until the moment of his injury — in the round 15 game against Olympic Safi. The operation took place on 26 December 2024: the club confirmed a triple fracture of the facial bones, the player was rushed to a clinic in Safi, and the operation was a success. Afterwards Murid thanked the club and everyone who supported him on social media.
He arrived in Kaliningrad not simply from the Moroccan league — six months before the transfer he'd had facial surgery.
7. Lokomotiv and the offer from Kaliningrad
In May 2025 Murid could have ended up at a different Russian club. Morocco's Le Matin reported: talks with Lokomotiv collapsed over Touarga's high financial demands. After that came an official offer from Baltika — about $900,000 (per Le Matin; the club never officially disclosed the sum).
Moroccan radio station Radio Mars later valued the deal at roughly 1 billion Moroccan centimes (about 10 million dirhams) — an insider estimate from a source, not a confirmed figure. Specialist databases such as Transfermarkt and Sofascore give a more modest valuation, €700-900k.
This was no random transfer. Talalaev explained: Baltika had been tracking Murid since winter 2025, deliberately looking for a "small, quick, sharp" central midfielder:
"Murid is a six-eight with big volume. In our central line we had nobody under 183 cm (Murid is 180 cm). We were specifically looking for a small, quick, sharp player à la Barrios. Tough, hungry for the ball, for the fight. The negotiations were long and hard, and it's good we managed to sign him."
The contract was signed on 29 June 2025 for four years — until 5 June 2029.
8. The year that was almost lost
The first season turned into a near-failure: 13 RPL matches, only 3 starts, 378 minutes. On 15 June 2026 Baltika's sporting director Armen Margaryan explained the reasons in an interview with Sport24:
"Everything got jumbled for him because of a heap of minor injuries and illnesses like tonsillitis. Plus Ayman is a devout Muslim, and during the Ramadan fast the workload was hard on him. Another problem is the language barrier: Ayman still hasn't built the communication with the Russian players that's so essential in the centre of the pitch. For now he has to resort to gestures, and in training to interpreters. I've moved from asking him to take the language seriously to demanding it."
9. "Now I understand Talalaev"
On 18 August 2026 Murid gave an interview in which his words fit Margaryan's explanation:
"Last year, when I'd only just arrived at the team, I still didn't fully understand exactly how we play, what kind of football we want to play. Now that a year has passed, I've worked it all out completely."
Not "I started training harder", but something more specific: Murid needed a season to learn Baltika's footballing language.
10. What changed on the pitch — in numbers
The words are worth checking against the numbers. The minutes in the two seasons almost match (378 against 379 — about 4.2 full games), so the comparison is fair. Below are per-90 figures, not season totals. And a reminder: last year he barely played, and this one has only just begun 🙂
Murid hasn't started taking on more duels— on those measures the numbers have even dipped slightly. But interceptions have grown more than fourfold with comparable time on the pitch. An interception differs from a tackle in that it happens before contact with the opponent, by anticipating the pass. This is the statistical footprint of "understanding the game": Murid spends less energy on reactive battles and more often finds himself in the right spot before the pass is played — exactly what a system with two holding midfielders reading each other's movements demands.
What's more, in the holding zone he plays both left-centre and right-centre, depending on his partner. That's an important point!
His attacking contribution has grown too: xG has almost doubled, and his dribbling has become three times as productive.
According to GPS data from the Rodina match (30.08.2026): in 55 minutes on the pitch Murid produced 54 high-speed actions — 40 bursts and 14 sprints, almost one acceleration a minute. The second-highest intensity figure in the team after Maksim Petrov.
11. The goal against Rodina as a symbol
On 30 August 2026 Murid started and in the 22nd minute was first to the ball in the box — Baltika won 3:0. The symbolism isn't that one goal changed everything, but that a couple of months ago the very fact of him starting looked far from obvious.
12. The national team: a path alongside the future stars of the 2022 World Cup
Murid never made his debut for the senior Morocco side. But his youth-team path can be traced more precisely than people tend to think, and there is a genuinely striking detail in that route.
It all started at 16-17: according to Transfermarkt, in the 2016/17 season Murid was part of Morocco U17. In one friendly of that period he missed a penalty in a game against Burkina Faso. In February 2018 — two matches for Morocco U19 against the UAE under Mustapha Madih. In August 2019 — a place in Jamal Sellami's Morocco U20 squad for the African Games.
And then — the most substantial episode. On 11 September 2019 the official Leganés website published a news item about the club's players being called up to national teams for the international window. Among them — Mohammed VI Academy graduate Youssef En-Nesyri, called up to Morocco U23 for two qualifying matches against Mali (7 and 10 September) in the qualifiers for the Africa Cup of Nations at that age level — the winner of the tie earned a ticket to the Tokyo Olympics. In the same call-up the club noted separately: "academy player Ayman Murid will also travel for this call-up."
In other words, Murid didn't just "cross paths" with the future stars of the Morocco national team in some abstract sense — he was on the same official call-up list as En-Nesyri, who three years later would play in a World Cup semi-final. Later in his career there were also call-ups to the Olympic team, where in those years Achraf Hakimi and Noussair Mazraoui were playing.
The last recorded episode — January 2023: a place in the Morocco A' squad for the African Nations Championship (CHAN) in Algeria, the tournament for players from domestic leagues. By then Murid was already playing for Union Touarga. But Morocco never went to the tournament: according to BeIN Sports, the federation was unable to obtain permission for its plane to enter Algeria, and CAF confirmed Morocco's withdrawal. The call-up came and went without a single match.
The upshot: in six and a half years — from U17 to CHAN — Murid never made his senior Morocco debut, but he was part of the system that the future semi-finalists of the 2022 World Cup came through in parallel.
The ending
Six years ago Murid sat on the bench in a match against Real Madrid and probably thought he was one step away from the big time. It turned out to be far more than that: Spain, a return to Morocco, a contract torn up early, a triple facial fracture, one more attempt to make it to Europe, a year almost without football in Kaliningrad.
In the summer of 2026 Baltika didn't get a new player. It finally got the Murid it had bought in the first place — he simply needed a year to learn two new languages: Russian for his teammates (he did learn at least a little, didn't he? He did, right?😄) and Talalaev's football for the pitch.
a few photos that didn't make it into the text — on Telegram
