Six Matches, Three Penalties, Two Red Cards: Nabil Maâloul's Belouizdad Exit Is a Paperwork Story Bigger Than the Scoresheet

It was two in the morning. Two tabs were open on my desk in Hyderabad — the stream from the 5 July Stadium on one side, the Algerian federation's referee appointment circular for that round on the other. The score read 2-2 and Mustapha Ghorbal's hand was going to his pocket for a second red card. The first had gone to USM Alger's Abada; the second to the man standing in the technical area, CR Belouizdad coach Nabil Maâloul. In the post-match press conference Maâloul sat down, answered questions, and then said he was stepping down. Six matches. The red flag for me was not the card. It was that number.

According to the Algerian newspaper El Khabar, Maâloul walked after just six matches in charge, stung by the result and furious at Ghorbal's decisions. The club has issued no official statement. Reports suggest Maâloul and club officials may meet later, leaving it unclear whether the resignation is final or a decision taken in the heat of the moment. By Monday the episode will be old news on the sports pages. But a coach leaving after six games, an international referee awarding three penalties in a single match and producing two red cards — these three things are recorded in three different places, and only one of those places records the truth without an edit. That place is not a press conference.

Context: a league whose ledger lives in the club office

The Algerian Ligue Professionnelle is the country's top flight, run by the professional league board inside the framework of the Algerian Football Federation (FAF). Sixteen clubs, a structure that is clean on paper and far messier on grass. CR Belouizdad is the capital's club, founded in 2026, and the most stable name of the last decade — five consecutive league titles between 2026 and 2026. For a club whose identity is continuity, a coaching resignation in round seven is a row that refuses to reconcile.

USM Alger, the opponent, is also from the capital, which makes this an internal city quarrel. USM Alger won the CAF Confederation Cup in 2026 — this was not a weak side against whom a 2-2 constitutes a catastrophe. The 5 July Stadium, with a capacity of roughly 64,000, is Algeria's largest ground and was built for exactly these occasions.

Nabil Maâloul is a former Tunisia national team coach — he took Tunisia to the 2026 World Cup and has worked at clubs including Espérance. That CV puts him, in the seventh round of the Algerian league, in front of an international referee: two different worlds, with no visible formal mechanism in this league to bridge them.

I keep a private archive going back to 2026 — match recordings, league circulars, appointment notices. Whenever a coach leaves 'because of the referee', I look for three things first: when the match report was published, whether a disciplinary hearing date has been set, and whether the club has registered the resignation with the league. On this story, all three answers are currently 'no'. And when all three answers are no, the story stops being about a referee and becomes about process.

Core: the arithmetic of three penalties is not what the screen showed

Three penalties in one match is rare, not impossible. But rarity does not make every rare event a conspiracy. In a 2-2 with three spot kicks, the arithmetic tells us at least this much: the two teams scored four goals between them, at least one came from the spot, and a large share of the match was decided by decisions inside the box. Three penalties also mean that on at least three occasions a defending team lost a duel in a way the referee judged punishable.

The row in the match data that makes the most noise is not the penalty count — it is that after a 2-2, one team's coach is resigning and the other team's player has been sent off, which means both dugouts left dissatisfied. When both sides are aggrieved, the problem is usually not bias but the limits of interpretation — and the remedy for that is training and review, not cards.

Mustapha Ghorbal is among the few Algerian referees on the FIFA list, with Africa Cup of Nations and World Cup qualifier appointments behind him. That record protects him and also entitles him to more scrutiny, not less. Being on the international list does not mean the decisions are flawless; it means the review mechanism should operate at the same level. The question is whether Algerian league review is public at all.

This is where I compare with my own backyard, because comparison is the only thing that makes this argument useful. In Indian football the referee's match report is also not public, AIFF disciplinary rulings are published late and in fragments, and touchline bans for coaches are usually learned from a press release rather than a document. Algeria is running the same architecture. When the referee's report is not public, the only available testimony in any dispute is the video clip a television channel loops — and a clip is never the whole match.

The red card shown to the coach is the hardest documentary fragment in this whole affair. Under Law 12, a coach can be dismissed from the technical area for dissent; he must then leave the area and cannot communicate during the match. The effect does not end that evening — a disciplinary committee sets the touchline ban, the club gets a fixed appeal window, and all of it is logged in a separate register. So even if this story vanishes from the newspapers tomorrow, the record of Maâloul's red card remains. A press-conference announcement can be forgotten; a disciplinary order cannot.

And this is where the number six attaches itself to the coach's story. Resigning after six matches looks emotional, but in the language of paperwork it is a contract question. How long was the deal, what was the exit clause for an incomplete season, what was the compensation arrangement, and has the club accepted the resignation in writing and notified the league — those four questions matter more than any press conference. A resignation announced at a microphone is not a resignation until it is written down and reaches the competition's register. The line in El Khabar's report about a possible later meeting is precisely evidence of that uncertainty.

My spreadsheet has years of such tabs, and row three frequently refuses to match the press release. In 2026, when FIFA suspended the AIFF, everyone wrote 'crisis' on announcement day, while the election dates had already slipped twice in the months before. The suspension was on the calendar; the announcement was only its public version. Belouizdad has something of the same shape. The coach's exit is a Saturday-evening event, but its causes are probably lodged in the contract signed at the start of the season and in squad-building gaps no referee can fix.

Contrarian: what the critics are missing

The easiest reading is that the referee drove the coach out. That reading sells, travels on Twitter, and is also the most convenient one for the club. But it has a technical flaw nobody is addressing: three penalties are usually not a symptom of attacking brilliance but of defensive failure. Three separate instances of wrong timing, wrong foot, wrong body shape inside the box is not a story about a referee's temperament; it is a story about a defensive structure. A team that has not worked out by round seven how its defenders stand in their own box does not have a whistle problem.

Second, the size of the reaction does not match the result. A 2-2 in an intra-city fixture in round seven is not a disaster — least of all for a side that won five straight league titles. If a coach is talking about walking after a draw, that conversation did not begin that evening; it merely reached a microphone. There is no documentary proof of a prepared exit, but the disproportion of the response is itself evidence that the gap between dugout and board predates kickoff.

Third, and least noticed — the club's silence. CR Belouizdad can issue a statement within hours when it wants to. Here, nothing official has come. When a major club stays silent about its coach's resignation, the silence is itself a statement — and it usually means the club has not yet decided what its face should look like in this story.

Fourth, 'a decision taken in the heat of the moment' — that phrase is not an emotion, it is a legal location. If the resignation is not final, the club must clarify that the coach remains under contract. If it is final, compensation and registration procedures must begin. Either way a document should exist. Until it does, blaming the referee gives the club a route around its own internal questions — and that is the manoeuvre I see in every league, from Hyderabad to Algiers.

One last point for those who assume an international referee is a guarantee. Ghorbal gave three penalties and two red cards. That does not mean he was wrong, and it does not mean he was right. It means his decisions deserve review at the level of his rank. Until that review is public, claims from both sides remain equally unsupported.

Takeaway: watch three documents before the next round

The next turn in this story will not come from a press conference. Three documents will decide whether this is a one-evening news item or a season-long inquiry. First, Ghorbal's match report — whether it is published and under which law the red card to Maâloul is recorded. Second, the disciplinary committee's order — how many matches the touchline ban runs and whether the club has filed an appeal. Third, the league register — whether Maâloul's resignation is recorded in writing or the club still considers him under contract.

If none of those three produces an answer by the next round, the news will not be that a coach left. It will be that a league which publishes its title roll every year does not publish its decisions. The stadium empties, so I followed the paperwork until it started making noise — and this time the paperwork has not begun to speak. When it does, we will learn who actually conceded defeat on Saturday night.