Welcome everybody to Soccer 101. My name is Taylor Rockwell. He's Graham Ruffman. Hello, Graham. Hello. And this week, we're heading to one of the oldest and most politically charged football leagues on the planet. It's the Egyptian Premier League founded in 1948 by royal decree from King Farouk I. A man who loved the game so much, he essentially willed a national league into existence. The Egyptian

Premier League has been a mirror of Egyptian society ever since. The league has survived a

revolution that toppled that same king, a catastrophic stadium disaster in Port Said in

2012 that killed 74 people, led to five years of matches behind closed doors, and the kind of

political interference that would make even Italian football blush.

Through it all, the league has functioned as the engine room, the driving force, the motivator

for the Egyptian national team, aside that won three consecutive African Cup of Nations

titles between 2006 and 2010, and will obviously be at this summer's World Cup.

So let's get into it.

Graham Ruthven, I am nervous.

This is a big, complicated topic with a lot of passionate support and even more passionate

beliefs behind it.

It feels like a challenge to even scratch the surface, but we're going to try.

What an introduction and a fitting introduction for what I totally agree is one of the more,

I guess, like notable and colourful leagues that we have done in the series on Soccer 101.

For anyone who doesn't know, we're doing a series on the leagues of qualified nations for the

2026 World Cup.

Egypt will be at this World Cup, which for a country of such football and quality

and success at Afcon level is not always a given.

They don't have the best World Cup records, but this league is one that I'm very excited to talk about on to this show.

They don't have the best World Cup record. And at least some of that is due to

the way qualifying has worked for African countries for a very long time, less so with this

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