An Omani man is going viral on social media after he realised that he’s been bringing bad luck to Fifa World Cup teams this year by wearing their flags as every team he has supported so far lost their games.
31-year-old Mohammed Al Hajri, an actor and social media influencer known as ‘Mjomba', has been lovingly dubbed by football fans as the World Cup’s "jinx mascot" on social media after he accurately predicted match losers by wearing their team colours.
He has been inundated with thousands of requests from Moroccan fans to wear a France jersey for Wednesday night's semi-final match.
Al Hajri’s spate of bad luck began from the first match of the tournament, where he lent his support by dressing up in the host country’s colours and flag. Qatar ended up losing 2-0 to Ecuador.
He then went to Saudi Arabia v Argentina match wearing Messi’s number 10 jersey and Argentina ended up losing 2-1 in one of the biggest shocks in World Cup history.
He dismissed the losses as a mere coincidence until he attended the England match against Senegal wearing the African nation's colourful red, green and yellow colours. Senegal lost 3-0.
“I didn’t know I’m jinxed until that point,” Al Hajri said in a post on his Instagram account.
His followers also noticed that the team he was cheering for was losing their matches, so Al Hajri decided to cheer on the team he wanted to lose.
“I bought a dress with a Korean flag to cheer for South Korea against Brazil. After 37 minutes, Brazil scored four goals,” he said on social media.
“There was a Moroccan fan beside me and told him what happened and he begged me not to come to the stadium for Morocco v Spain match.”
Al Hajri wore the Spanish colours and went to the stadium with the Moroccan fans and the jinx worked again — the game ended 0-0 but Morocco went through on penalties.
Al Hajri has had a 100 per cent accuracy rate to his predictions so far, with his adornment of team colours causing football giants like Brazil, Portugal and Netherlands to crash out of the tournament.
Al Hajri recently attended the Argentina v Croatia semi-final match on Tuesday.
As an ardent Argentina fan, he was dressed in Croatia’s red and white football jersey. Croatia lost to Argentina 3-0.
Several tweets directed at Mjomba in recent days show Moroccan fans asking the man to wear the French colours for their upcoming match on Wednesday after he successfully predicted Portugal’s loss to Morocco in the quarter-finals.
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