Around half the stadium in Fez was left empty as crowds of fans waited in the cool evening air in the hope of snatching a glimpse of their heroes. "It's a match against poverty but poor people like us are not given the right to go in?" said Majd, a 16-year-old student from a poor neighbourhood nearby. "There are often good games here but we never go as it costs 30 dirhams."

Tickets to the charity match were sold for between 50 and 1,000 dirhams and organisers said many were bought by businesses who then donated them to local development groups to distribute among the less well-off.

A similar meeting raised around 600,000 euros last year for projects including Comoros Islands microfinance, theatre in Rio de Janeiro and water systems in Sri Lanka.
The match was aimed at promoting the Millennium Development Goals such as eradicating extreme hunger and poverty, achieving universal primary education and reducing child mortality.

"We don't forget where we have come from and we are uniting in a good cause," former France international Zidane, who grew up in a poor neighbourhood of Marseille, told reporters.

Local United Nations Development Programme representative Mourad Wahda said Morocco was chosen for the progress it had made in human development. The north African kingdom is struggling to create enough jobs for a growing young population and poverty and illiteracy remain widespread in its towns and cities.

Far away in one of the city's poorer neighborhoods, a group of boys kicked a ball around in a quiet side-street. Most dreamed of being a football star like Zidane, a symbol of success in his ancestral homeland of north Africa.

One of the boys, Abdelmajid Fedal, said his family had lived in Fez since his grandfather abandoned a smallholding near the southern Moroccan town of Ouarzazate for lack of money. When not at school, Abdelmajid spends his time playing football.

"We need our local football pitch to be improved, but that's not Zidane's job, it's our mayor's," said the 16-year-old.