Twelve years. That’s how long Algerian football fans waited to see their national team back on the World Cup stage. When Vladimir Petkovic guided Les Fennecs through qualifying and into a brutal Group J alongside Argentina, Austria, and Jordan, the credit flowed almost entirely his way. But look closer at the squad list, and a more uncomfortable truth emerges: the players who actually got Algeria out of the group stage weren’t Petkovic’s discoveries. They were Djamel Belmadi’s.
The Generation Someone Else Built
Riyad Mahrez, Amine Gouiri, Nabil Bentaleb, Aïssa Mandi, Houssem Aouar — the spine of this World Cup squad was assembled, internationalized, and hardened over Belmadi’s six years in charge, from 2018 to 2023. It was Belmadi who won Algeria the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations, who dragged this generation from perennial underachievers to African champions, and who built the winning culture and squad depth that made this World Cup qualification possible in the first place. Petkovic took over in February 2024 — after that core had already been shaped by someone else’s work over half a decade.
Petkovic ran the qualifying campaign himself, and that’s real: five wins and a draw to reach the World Cup. But he didn’t build the team that won those games. He inherited it, fully formed, ready-made, battle-tested by a different manager’s philosophy.
What He Actually Did With It
And what did he do with a squad already stocked with Premier League, Serie A, and Bundesliga quality? Algeria opened the tournament with a chastening 3-0 defeat to Argentina — forgivable on paper against the champions, less forgivable in how disorganized the back line looked in doing it. A scrappy 2-1 win over Jordan followed, then a 3-3 draw with Austria in which Algeria led and failed to see it out. Six goals conceded in two matches against sides that were not the tournament’s elite is not what you’d expect from a coach specifically hired, in part, for his defensive pedigree in Switzerland.
Algeria scraped into the knockout rounds in third place rather than controlling the group outright — and then were eliminated in the very first knockout match, beaten 0-2 by Switzerland, the country where Petkovic made his name.
And Then the FAF Made It Worse
If Petkovic’s tournament exposed his limits, the Algerian Football Federation’s timing exposed something close to institutional malpractice. Just days before the squad departed for the World Cup, the FAF announced it had extended Petkovic’s contract through July 2028 — complete with a pay rise — locking him in before a single ball had been kicked at the tournament. Federation president Walid Sadi framed it as a vote of stability and continuity. In hindsight, it reads as a federation writing a blank check on results it hadn’t seen yet.
The reasoning wasn’t unreasonable on its face: qualification secured, a decent underlying record, a rise up the FIFA rankings. But committing to two more years — and a bigger salary — before the actual World Cup performance was in the books meant the FAF had no leverage and no room to react when the tournament went sideways. Sure enough, the moment Algeria crashed out in the Round of 32, the same federation that had just handed Petkovic a raise found itself scrambling to negotiate an exit, reportedly discussing a severance package worth five or six months’ salary to undo a deal signed barely weeks earlier.
That is about as poor a piece of institutional timing as a football federation can produce: paying to keep a coach, then paying again to get rid of him, all within the space of a single tournament. If the FAF had simply waited three more weeks to see how the World Cup actually played out, none of this would have been necessary. Instead, Algerian football is now paying twice for a decision it didn’t need to make when it did.
Stewardship, Not Building
None of this is to say reaching the World Cup means nothing — it doesn’t, and ending a 12-year absence matters to a football-mad country. But there’s a difference between building something and managing what’s already been built. Belmadi assembled the talent and the identity. Petkovic was handed the keys to a car someone else had tuned, and drove it into a first-round wall — and the federation handed him a new contract for the privilege before finding out. If the Algerian federation is measuring this cycle honestly, the question isn’t just “did we qualify?” It’s “what has this coach actually added, and why did we commit to more of it before we knew?” On the evidence of this tournament, the honest answer on both counts is: not enough, and too soon.
Opinion piece. Belmadi managed Algeria 2018–2023 (2019 AFCON title); Petkovic took over in February 2024 and led the 2026 World Cup qualifying campaign and tournament run (0-3 vs Argentina, 2-1 vs Jordan, 3-3 vs Austria, eliminated 0-2 by Switzerland in the Round of 32). The FAF extended his contract through 2028 days before the tournament began, then moved to part ways with him after the elimination.
