High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Algerian national team was formed in clandestine circumstances in 1958 when Mohamed Boumezrag, a leader of a section of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) of Algeria based in metropolitan France, returned from the 1957 World Youth Festival, in which a team representing Algeria, then a French colony, had taken part in an unofficial football tournament. Using the contacts he had made during the tournament, Boumezrag recruited 10, and eventually 30, of the best-known French-based Algerian professional players to secretly leave the country and go to Tunisia where the Algerian national team was formally established on 13 April.