The tournament is a week old. Algeria has played one match. The relationship between watching it from here and watching the European leagues is harder to describe than I expected.
The matches are on every screen. Cafés have moved their TVs outdoors despite the winter, with heaters underneath and crowds around them. Group chats are louder than they have been in two years. The diaspora is calling home about substitutions. The conversation has texture that the Premier League weekends do not produce in this city, no matter how big the fixture.
But something else is happening underneath. There is a tension in how the tournament is being watched. Morocco is hosting. Algeria is competing. The diplomatic rupture between the two countries has not closed. When Morocco plays, the broadcast cuts to crowd shots that are exuberant in a way that complicates the Algerian viewer's relationship with the entire event.
The football itself helps. Algeria's first match was disappointing but watchable. The squad is in transition. The new coach is still finding his preferred eleven. The midfield is the most balanced it has been in five years. The forwards are not.
What is most striking from here is the gap between how the tournament is covered globally and how it is lived locally. The European press will frame the entire tournament around storylines that make sense in Europe. The crowd violence at the Egypt match. The disallowed goal in the Senegal-Ivory Coast quarter-final. The host nation drama. From inside the region, the tournament is a hundred smaller stories happening at once. The cup is not the story. The cup is the occasion.
I will write about specific matches when there is something specific to say. For now, I am just watching, like everyone else here is watching. The conversations afterward are the part the European press will never capture.