Morocco's coach, who guided the country's first African team to the FIFA World Cup semi-finals against France on Wednesday, grew up in Essonne, where he was a natural leader and a football fanatic.
Walid Regragui was born in 1975 in Corbie-Issonne, a town of 500,000 people located south-east of Paris.
The French-Moroccan began kicking balls at Monconsay in the late 1980s, not far from its now-demolished tower. He frequently competes against the other squad in Tartary with his childhood mates.
"We were playing tournaments, Monconseil was Milan and Tartori was Barcelona. The atmosphere was very good, that's how I knew him when he was 10 and we followed each other with AS Corby," Demba Diagoraga, current director of the Tartori district center, tells AFP.
Regragui was described as a "very serious fighter" with a "natural leader" role.
In that era, Walid Rakragui was a "fan" of the Italian club AC Milan, which dominated European football, and with him the "reference" of Dutch goal-scoring Marco van Basten.
"Walid has always been a playmaker, the number 10 player. Basically this was his favorite position," explains Azzedine Aweys, a childhood friend and head of the Citizen and Solidarity group at Corby-Esson. As a leader, he was "outdoing us, motivating us".
The current coach of the "Atlas Lions" joined the junior squad and later the juniors of Corby-Eason, which closed its doors in 2016. He began his career as a right-midfielder, later as a right-back.
"He was quick," Cubs coach Bernard Casero explains, pushing him into the playmaker position or winger, "has a good vision of the game" and "
"He used to speak in the dressing rooms and motivate his colleagues," according to his old coach. "He was almost the team's spokesperson on the field, it was instinctive."
On the field, former teammate and friend from Corby High School Davide Feo recalls: He was a player "obsessed with football who plays to win": "He shined, he got through difficult situations and then he accelerated. Because of his dribbling and acceleration, Rudi Garcia noticed him".
Feo added, “after obtaining a baccalaureate in accounting, he told us: Well, I will leave school now and devote myself to my football career. We all wanted to be professionals, but he achieved his goal. He always works to win.”
At that time, Kobe-Eason coach Rudi Garcia spotted him between 1994 and 1998 during a youth match.
Garcia, who has known him since he was 19, explains, “By observing the third youth team, I noticed a fast, elegant, technical striker, so I asked: What does he do with the third team? I brought him with me to the first team (in the amateur league), he became a regular and we went up to the fourth division.”
Regragui began his professional career with Racing Club, then moved on to Toulouse (1999-2001), Ajaccio (2001-2004), Spanish Racing Santander, then Dijon and Grenoble (2007-2009) in the second division.
He remembers his colleague in Grenoble, the Algerian striker Nassim Akrour, who was like him among the team's cadres, "he was an addition on the tactical level, and his personality was very strong. He was a seasoned player...who gives advice to the younger generation."
In Grenoble, Regragui played for a short time with Olivier Giroud, then twenty-one years old, one of the stars of the French national team who will meet them on Wednesday at Al Bayt Stadium in Al Khor, and who has scored four goals for the blue team in the current finals so far.