FIFA World Cup 2026: Here's why Sweden midfielder Yasin Ayari didn't celebrate his goal against Tunisia

Sweden midfielder Yasin Ayari opened the scoring in his team's FIFA World Cup 2026 Group F match against Tunisia.

Ayari gave Sweden a 1-0 lead as early as the seventh minute of the match. It was a special moment for the 22-year-old, but he did not celebrate his goal, despite it being his first-ever in a FIFA World Cup match.

Sweden went on to win the match 5-1 as Ayari added another goal in the fifth minute of stoppage time in the second half.

According to the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, Tunisia's representatives approached Ayari in 2021 and offered him the opportunity to switch allegiances and play for Tunisia at the 2022 FIFA World Cup. However, Ayari decided to play for the Swedish football team, and even his father wanted him to do so.

“My son wanted to play for Tunisia, but I asked him to represent Sweden instead, as it is the country that welcomed and developed him," Azzouz Ayari, his father, told Aftonbladet.

"It was his duty to give something back," he added. Yasin Ayari, too, revealed that he wanted to represent Sweden, since it is his birth country. “I was born in Sweden and feel Swedish, and Sweden is the country I want to represent,” he said.

Ayari began his club football career through the youth academy of AIK Solna in Sweden. He made his senior professional debut in 2020 in the Allsvenskan, the Swedish top-flight league. He was just 16 years old when he made his senior debut.

He left AIK in 2023 and signed up for Premier League side Brighton and Hove Albion in January 2023.

He signed a four-and-a-half-year contract with Brighton that runs till June 2027, but that included loan spells with Coventry City and Blackburn Rovers. Ayari made his senior international debut for Sweden in an international friendly against Finland in January 2023. He played 82 minutes and helped his side beat Finland 2-0 in the friendly match.

Apart from Tunisia, the other teams in Sweden’s group are the Netherlands and Japan. Sweden will face the Netherlands in Houston on 20 June before taking on Japan in their final group stage match on 25 June in Dallas.

Sweden head coach Graham Potter had told FIFA in an interview earlier in June that his team would have to be at their best to get out of the group stage. Sweden is playing their first FIFA World Cup since the 2018 edition in Russia, where it reached the quarter-finals before losing to England.

"It's a tournament that brings everybody together, and we want to play our part in that," he said. "(As a team) they're far from perfect, but in some ways that's what it means to be a team, what it means to represent Sweden.

"They had to suffer, they had to dig in, they had to show some quality at times, and they did all that. We want to represent our country in the best way, show who we are collectively and as individuals, and ultimately enjoy it," the former Brighton and Chelsea manager added.