THE OTHER NATIONAL TEAM · EGYPT
During the men’s World Cup, FemGol will trace the history of some of the women’s national teams from the countries taking to the pitch. Because a country’s football doesn’t fit in a single team.
Egypt reached the match against Argentina after crossing a barrier they had spent decades trying to overcome. A draw against Australia followed by victory in the penalty shootout took them through a World Cup knockout tie for the first time and allowed Mohamed Salah to celebrate something that had never previously appeared in the history of Africa’s most decorated national team.
In less than three weeks, another Egyptian national team will begin an international tournament of its own.
Egypt will compete in the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations in Morocco for the first time since 2016. It will be only the Cleopatras’ third appearance in the competition. They have been drawn alongside Nigeria, the defending champions and dominant force in African women’s football, Zambia and Malawi in a tournament that will take place from 26 July to 16 August.
The distance between the two national teams cannot be summed up by comparing trophies. The men have won seven Africa Cup of Nations titles. The women have spent more time trying to return than competing.
Before there was a league, and even before the country’s biggest clubs accepted that women’s football also belonged to them, there was a woman travelling across Egypt in search of players.
The national team came before the league
Sahar El Hawary grew up in a family connected to football. Her father had been a player and an international referee, but no equivalent path existed for her. Football was a male space, and the simple idea of a woman wanting to referee or play met resistance both inside and outside the institutions.
In 1993, she decided to build the structure she could not find.
El Hawary searched for talent in schools and streets across the country. She brought some of those young women to Cairo, provided them with accommodation and food, organised training camps and created teams so they could play against one another. During the early years, much of it was paid for out of her own pocket.
She was not strengthening an existing academy system. She was trying to prove that enough women wanted to play for such a system to exist at all.
The national team came before the league. El Hawary travelled around the country, brought players together and invited foreign teams to Egypt for friendly matches. In 1996, the Egyptian Football Association created its first women’s football committee. Two years later, Egypt secured a place at the continental tournament in Nigeria.
The African competition had already held two editions through home-and-away knockout ties, but the 1998 tournament was the first to be organised as a centralised finals competition in one country. Egypt eliminated Uganda in qualifying and travelled to Nigeria alongside seven other national teams.
The results showed the distance that still separated the new side from Africa’s leading teams. Egypt lost 4-1 to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, suffered another 4-1 defeat against Morocco and finished the group with a 6-0 loss to Nigeria. They ended without a point, having scored twice and conceded 14 goals.
It was not a competitive breakthrough. It was a declaration of existence.
A national league was launched after that experience. The competition began in 2000 with clubs such as Al Maaden and Wadi Degla, but without the two giants that had shaped much of the country’s football identity. Al Ahly and Zamalek refused for years to add women’s teams to their structures.
The national team also disappeared from major tournaments.
Eighteen years to win a match
Egypt needed 18 years to return to the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations.
They did so in Cameroon in 2016. They lost 2-0 to the hosts in their opening match, but three days later defeated Zimbabwe 1-0. It was Egypt’s first victory at a continental finals tournament, achieved after five defeats across their appearances in 1998 and 2016.
The possibility of reaching the semi-finals remained alive until the final group match. South Africa won 5-0 and eliminated the Egyptians.
That appearance did not lead to continuity either.
Egypt were absent in 2018 and 2022, and also missed the 2024 edition staged in Morocco during the summer of 2025. For years, their history returned to the same sequence: an attempt to rebuild, a handful of international matches and another disappearance.
That is why Egypt’s return in 2026 requires an important caveat.
They did not initially qualify.
A door that opened after defeat
The Cleopatras began the 2025 qualifiers with a 1-0 victory in Rwanda. The result took them into a final round against Ghana, a team traditionally regarded as one of the strongest in African women’s football.
The tie was never close. Ghana won 3-0 in Egypt and 4-0 in the return leg. Doris Boaduwaa scored four of the seven goals, completing a 7-0 aggregate victory that, at the time, eliminated Egypt from the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations.
Their reprieve came one week later.
The Confederation of African Football decided to expand the tournament from 12 to 16 teams after qualifying had already ended. To fill the four additional places, it turned to the FIFA ranking and selected the four highest-ranked teams eliminated in the final round: Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mali and Egypt, ranked 95th at the time.
Egypt will be in Morocco because they received a second opportunity after conceding seven goals.
There is no reason to turn that reprieve into a triumph. Its value lies elsewhere. The expansion returns Egypt to a major tournament and gives the national team something it has lacked for too long: the chance to connect one appearance to the next instead of beginning again from nothing.
The competition also forms part of Africa’s route towards the 2027 Women’s World Cup in Brazil. For Egypt, talk of a first World Cup qualification still seems premature. Sharing a group with Nigeria and Zambia places their ambitions in perspective. But returning to that path will at least provide a measure of what has changed since 2016.
The giants arrived because they had to
One of those differences can be found in the league.
In October 2024, Al Ahly and Zamalek contested the first women’s derby in their history. Almost 25 years had passed since the creation of the national competition.
Their arrival did not come solely from a cultural transformation within the clubs. CAF had linked licences for its men’s competitions to the existence of women’s football structures. If the country’s biggest clubs wanted to continue competing in the CAF Champions League or Confederation Cup, they also needed to create women’s teams.
The requirement achieved what decades of appeals had failed to accomplish.
Al Ahly and Zamalek entered an 18-team league, brought their rivalry into women’s football and attracted media attention that clubs such as Wadi Degla had pursued for years without possessing their badges, audiences or financial power.
That does not mean every problem has been solved. It means the country’s two most powerful clubs can no longer behave as though women’s football does not form part of Egyptian football.
The national team, coached by Mohamed Kamal, has also stepped up its preparations ahead of the tournament. During the opening months of 2026, Egypt played two friendlies against Algeria, losing 0-3 and 2-3, and another two against Saudi Arabia, which ended in 2-1 and 2-0 victories. The results help to place the team’s current level in context: capable of defeating national teams still developing their own structures, but some distance behind the more established sides on the continent.
Nigeria and Zambia will provide another indication of where the ceiling truly lies.
The third time
Since Sahar El Hawary began building the national team, Egypt have needed more than three decades to reach their third Women’s Africa Cup of Nations.
The first team was born because El Hawary searched for players, brought them to Cairo and paid for them to train. The second appearance came 18 years later. The third required an expansion agreed after the team had already been eliminated.
This is not the story of a sleeping powerhouse. It is the story of a country with enough players to compete, but without the continuity required to discover how far they might go.
While Mohamed Salah and the men’s national team occupy the World Cup’s main stage, the Cleopatras are preparing for a far less visible return. They will not play in front of the entire world and they will not begin among the favourites. Their first objective will be more modest and perhaps more important: ensuring that this third appearance does not again become their last for another decade.
Sahar El Hawary had to pay out of her own pocket to prove that Egypt could also have a women’s national team.
Thirty-three years later, the question is no longer whether it exists.
The question is whether Egypt are finally prepared to sustain it.
