Hakim Ziyech

Hakim Ziyech is a Moroccan professional footballer, born in Dronten, Netherlands, on 19 March 1993.¹² An attacking midfielder and winger known to Ajax supporters as "the Wizard", he won league and cup titles in the Netherlands, the Champions League with Chelsea and the Süper Lig with Galatasaray.¹ With Morocco he reached the semi-finals of the 2022 World Cup, a first for an African nation.¹

Ziyech was born in Dronten to Moroccan parents originally from Tafoughalt, a Berber village in north-eastern Morocco, and was the youngest of nine children.¹ His father, Mohamed Ziyech, who had come to the Netherlands in 1967, died on 23 December 2003, when Hakim was ten; the article recounts a troubled youth that followed, steadied by the former footballer Aziz Doufikar, who became a father figure and mentor.¹ He joined Heerenveen's youth academy in 2007.¹

Ziyech made his senior debut for Heerenveen in 2012 and joined Twente in 2014, where he was the club's top scorer and, for a time, its captain.¹ He signed for Ajax in August 2016 for a reported €11 million, won the Eredivisie and the KNVB Cup in 2018–19, and was named Dutch Footballer of the Year for 2017–18.¹ At Chelsea from 2020 he won the Champions League, the UEFA Super Cup and the FIFA Club World Cup, and he won successive Süper Lig titles with Galatasaray in 2023–24 and 2024–25 before spells at Al-Duhail, Wydad and Botafogo.¹

After playing for the Netherlands at youth level, Ziyech made his senior debut for Morocco in 2015 and went on to win 64 caps and score 25 goals before his international career ended in 2024.¹ He played at the 2018 World Cup and at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, where Morocco finished fourth — the best result by an African nation — and captained the side during its later matches.¹ The article records that he has donated all his international earnings and bonuses to charities or to the team's staff, and that he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the Throne after the 2022 tournament.¹

This section sets out different positions as reported in the sources. It is not a verdict by the museum. The English article's personal-life section states that Ziyech "has been described as a devout and practicing Muslim", and records his support for the Palestinian cause, including a donation of three hundred thousand meals to the Gaza Strip in March 2025.¹ The Arabic article's infobox gives his religion as Islam generically, a value drawn from Wikidata.² Neither source names a legal school or theological affiliation for him, so his faith is recorded in the museum's data as unknown.¹²

• Hakim Ziyech — English Wikipedia¹
• Hakim Ziyech — Arabic Wikipedia²