Taher Lwati sat outside a toyshop on one of the quiet avenues that crisscross central Tunis, soaking up the warm evening air and ruminating on the chances of an unlikely footballing victory.

“The national team comes above all else. I’ve been following the sport for years and, really, I just want to see Tunisia get through to the next round before I die,” said Lwati, 63. To do that, the side will have to prove their mettle on Monday against their first World Cup opponents: England.

“The English team is way out of our league, but football is full of surprises, even the England coach says so. But, you know,” he said, “if God wills it, we might do it.”

For many in Tunisia, celebrated abroad as the sole success of the Arab spring, the fruits of 2011 have provided slim pickings. Mired in debt, struggling against unemployment and enmeshed in the throes of a political and economic crisis, ordinary Tunisians’ nerves are frayed and the World Cup promises sorely needed relief. As violence continues to dominate the domestic league, the national team provides a single point of focus that, for a few weeks, the entire country can look to in hope.

“I’m surprisingly confident. Yes, it could happen,” said Souhail Khmira, a Tunisian football journalist. “Either way, whatever happens, we’re going to see some beautiful, aggressive football. My generation never got to see the 1978 team [the side that secured the first win for an African team at the finals], so we grew up watching submissive, boring, defensive football. A clean sheet is no kind of ambition.”

Tunisia first qualified for the World Cup 40 years ago, and then took part in three tournaments from 1998 to 2006. This, however, will be the first time they have played in the tournament since the jasmine revolution that toppled the dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. “This team is different,” said Khmira. “We’ve got some strong tactical players who can create opportunities to score. Look out for Naim Sliti, Anice Badri and Wahbi Khazri. They could do it. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, we’ve got to be realistic, but yes, draws against England and Belgium and a win against Panama could put us through. It could happen.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tunisian striker Anice Badri. Photograph: Lars Baron/FIFA/Getty Images

Across Tunisia the national game has retained a sense of purity, untainted by either political self-interest or marred by the increasingly violent clashes between fans and police that have come to define the country’s domestic league.

“The national football team has never been associated with Ben Ali or [former leader Habib] Bourguiba,” said Hamza Meddeb, a research fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, who specialises in Tunisian affairs. “It has always been a unifying force or symbol of the nation. Of course, football has always been used by regimes as an instrument of legitimacy. Ben Ali’s regime invested a lot in organising international football tournaments. However, the national football team was never perceived as something exclusive to the regime. It belongs to the whole nation in spite of this political instrumentalisation.”

Nevertheless many of Tunisia’s contemporary political figures are looking to associate themselves with the sport and its power to galvanise a public increasingly disillusioned with Tunis’s political infighting. “Many examples show the growing importance of football in political careers after 2011,” Meddeb said, pointing to the party of President Beji Caid Essebsi, Nidaa Tounes, whose lead candidates for recent municipal elections in Tunis, Sousse and Sfax were current or former presidents of the cities’ football clubs.

However, the sense of national unity is far removed from the violence that has dogged its domestic game as, in the face of entrenched unemployment and widespread corruption, many of Tunisia’s young football fans are finding a sense of identity within their clubs and the clashes with the notoriously heavy-handed police. In April, that violence claimed the life of 19-year-old Omar Laabidi, after police were accused of chasing him into one of the canals near the national stadium.

Football had “always been an arena for political contestation,” Meddeb said. “Young people express their grievances in football stadiums, organise themselves into ultras groups and defy the police forces. Increasingly violence becomes a serious feature of the stadiums.”

World Cup Fiver: sign up and get our daily football email

Moreover, as violence fuels still further violence, the situation deteriorates. “Some groups are getting fascinated by violence and many ultras members became jihadists. The economic and social crisis is fuelling youth anger that finds in football a mean to express this disenchantment.”

Nabil Ben Khayatia, a kitchen worker from Tunis, said the national game was different. “There’s no violence,” he said. “People come together. I’ll be watching it with all my family. We’ll go out to a cafe and cheer on the national team. There’ll be young people, old people, everyone’s going to be there.”

Taher agreed. “Women, old men, children: everyone’s really excited for the World Cup,” he said. “It’s going to bring us together. For me, I’m counting down the minutes to the next game.”