African Player of the Year. Professionalism – that was the word coming to mind when looking at the vote. African football was getting stronger, no doubt, and quality was getting associated with professionalism. Hence, European-based players occupied the top positions no matter how strong continental football was becoming: Egypt ruled continental football in 1986, but the top three players were all based in Europe. World Cup counted most, as usual, so no surprise two of the best were Moroccon. Cameroonian Roger Milla (Montpellier, France) was 3rd with 80 points. Azis Bouderbala (FC Sion, Switzerland and Morocco) – second with 88 points.
Ezzaki Badou was voted best player of Africa, getting 125 points. Written like that, the name may sound unfamiliar – popularly, that was Zaki, the goalkeeper and the captain of the Moroccan national team.
Naturally, the Moroccan performance at the 1986 World Cup was instrumental, but Zaki was well known in Africa for quite some time and his qualities were recognized elsewhere during the World Cup finals.
Recognition moved him from Widad (Casablanca) to Spanish side Mallorca after the end of the World Cup, so he also was European based professional at the time of the voting.
Zaki was 27 years old at the time with plenty of experience on both club and national team level – he already played at the 1984 Olympic games and twice at the African Cup of Nations and, as a whole, had 10 years of top level football – he debuted in 1976 for Association Sale (Morocco), moved to the leading club Widad in 1978, and eventually found himself in Spain. Already he was voted among the top three players in Africa – 3rd. His World Cup performance was remarkable and he pretty much deserved to be voted number one African player. He also got most points in the history of voting the top continental player to date, but this is not all that important: with time, more journalists were involved, so more points was inevitable occurance.