Canada’s Ali Ahmed on home World Cup dream: ‘I want to win our group’

Ali Ahmed watched the last World Cup at home with friends and family. “It was goose bumps seeing Canada walking out,” the winger says. “I haven’t seen that in my lifetime. It was surreal.” This time around he will again be at home but also very much at the heart of the action in two cities that are dear to him.

Jesse Marsch’s side face Qatar and Switzerland in Vancouver after an opener against a European playoff winner (possibly Italy) in Toronto. Italy in Toronto, Ahmed’s home town, would be special, not only because of the city’s vast Italian population – “the stadium might be more blue than red,” Ahmed jokes – but also because his parents, who are from Ethiopia but lived for two years in Italy, are big calcio fans. “Football was ingrained in all of us in our family,” he says.

On the outskirts of Toronto, not far from where he grew up, a teenage Ahmed used to hop over the fence of MLS side Toronto FC before dawn to have a kickabout with friends on the training pitches there. “Why not go and get a taste?” the Norwich player says, smiling, at the club’s training ground. “A perfect pitch, nice nets and things like that. But the security people were sharp.”

Ahmed has been at Norwich since January, when he signed from Vancouver Whitecaps. The 25-year-old has nailed down a place on the left wing, contributing to an upturn in form under Philippe Clement that has pushed them into the top half of the Championship. Ahmed started each of Norwich’s seven games that fell during Ramadan, when was getting up before 4am for Suhoor, the pre-dawn meal.

Fasting during a crunch period of the English season has been “a learning curve” for Ahmed. A week after Manchester City’s Muslim players were booed when a Premier League game at Leeds was stopped so they could break their fast, there was applause when Norwich’s FA Cup tie at Elland Road was halted for Ahmed and Leeds’ Joël Piroe to break theirs. “In general in England, they’ve gone above and beyond to make the player feel more accepted in what they’re doing,” Ahmed says.

This week Ahmed heads home to Toronto, where Canada are due to play friendlies against Iceland and Tunisia. He is candid when talking about his upbringing in the Lawrence Heights neighbourhood. “Unfortunately it’s a community that’s experienced a lot of gun violence,” he says. “Growing up, a lot of people you know maybe get shot, maybe are dead. You hear shots, you hear police, it’s tough.” Despite this he describes a united, close-knit place: “Not the most beautiful community, but the people inside are beautiful.”

Football was a route out, but it led Ahmed to places he did not expect. At 17 he turned down a spot in the Toronto FC academy to fly to Portugal on the advice of a youth coach. While training with Belenenses’ under-19s, Ahmed paid his own way, staying in Lisbon hostels, but could not sign for them until he was 18. When that milestone came, the contract did not.

He tried his luck in Spain and the Netherlands, and also in England with trials at Enfield Town, Cheshunt and Tooting & Mitcham. “I was a skinny kid coming into a non-league club. It didn’t look great,” he says of a character-developing stage in his life. “At the time, when you want something so bad you’re numb to some of the struggles that you have to go through. When I look at it now, I would never do it again. It’s like: ‘What was I doing?’”

The youth coach that had set Ahmed up with Belenenses knew somebody back in Canada at the Whitecaps, where he initially had a trial cancelled because of the pandemic. Within a couple of years, Ahmed snared a professional contract. “The joy that I had was like: ‘Oh, finally, I really made it.’ But I knew my ambitions. I knew it was just a start.”

In 2023, Ahmed was knocked unconscious in a Canadian Championship game and treated on the pitch for 17 minutes. “I hit the floor,” he says. “I remember waking up and I thought I was in bed … I thought I was dreaming that I scored.” He was treated in hospital, couldn’t walk for the rest of the day owing to the dizziness but escaped with no real damage.

Ahmed could have been forgiven for thinking he was dreaming when, six months after going pro with the Whitecaps, he was playing for Canada, a rise he describes as “crazy”. The following year he and Canada faced Lionel Messi’s Argentina at the Copa América, once in the group stage and then in a 2-0 semi-final defeat. At the end of last year, Messi’s Inter Miami beat the Whitecaps in the MLS Cup final, Ahmed equalising in the 3-1 loss.

Marsch’s Canada were the great disruptors at that Copa América and there is a feeling they could punch above their weight again this summer. “I want to win our group,” Ahmed says. “And then from there, into the knockout rounds. It’s important to have that belief that we can play with anybody. Why not?”

Home advantage is enormous and, for the Canada men’s team, a first at a World Cup. If they top Group B, their next two knockout games would also be in Vancouver. Ahmed has no concerns about playing in the US in the current political climate, saying Canada would just have to block out “external things”, but who can blame him for wanting to play as many games as possible in two cities that mean the world to him. “It’s going to be a perfect setup for me, playing in Toronto and Vancouver – I couldn’t ask for anything better.”

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