Queuing in the designated area to meet players after an English football match on a cold Saturday night in December can be a thankless task for the local newspaper reporters and website correspondents sent to do so. It can be thankless because often players do not stop to speak.
Imagine their surprise, then, when on 6 December, one of the world’s best footballers stopped not only to speak but to accuse his club of making him a scapegoat for recent poor performances. “It seems like the club is throwing me under the bus,” he said. It made headlines around the world.
That footballer was Mohamed (or ‘Mo’) Salah, Liverpool Football Club’s Egyptian star and the third highest goalscorer in the club’s 130-year history, who had just spent a third consecutive match on the substitutes’ bench. Salah said his relationship with the club’s manager Arne Slot had broken down and accused Liverpool of not wanting him to remain at the club where he has spent eight golden years, helping deliver silverware. His has been the most successful spell of any Arab or African player in English football by some considerable margin.
The plaudits for Salah are justified. He became the Premier League’s all-time top overseas goalscorer, a roll call of names that underlines the scale of his achievement, scoring more than any player from outside the country in the world’s strongest league. How did this boy from Egypt’s Nile Delta countryside become a global phenomenon?
From Egypt’s alleys
Salah was born in the village of Nagrig in the summer of 1992. Raised in a middle-class family that backed, he dreamt of becoming a footballer, so took the five-hour journey from his village to Cairo, where he believed he could reach his potential. His pace, unusual among Egyptian players, and a deadly left foot caught the scouts’ eyes.
He came without the excessive showmanship of other footballing talents, his habits having been shaped by street football in Egypt’s alleys and on its uneven rural fields. Scouts moved him quickly from Ittihad Basyoun, the closest town to his village in Gharbia Governorate, to Othmason Tanta in the governorate’s capital. Before long, they realised his talent needed a bigger stage, so when he was 13, they moved him on swiftly to Al Mokawloon Al Arab (Arab Contractors Football Club), the team representing one of Egypt’s major construction and contracting companies.
For boys from the Egyptian countryside, the route to Cairo’s two biggest clubs—Al Ahly and Zamalek—and then to the Egypt national team is rarely completed without a belief in one’s own abilities. Skipping past defenders as if they were training cones, the issue soon boiled down to what he felt he could achieve. Years later, he would be skipping past some of the world’s best defenders in some of the world’s biggest stadia in Europe’s biggest footballing competitions.
Salah had become a first team player for Al Mokawloon Al Arab before he turned 18 and it did not take long for the country’s football establishment to court a new talent who looked set for the national side. Egyptian football was in crisis after political events spilled into the stands and brought games to a halt, but the disruption opened a door, one Salah stepped through and never looked back.
Next stop: Europe
He broke into European football without fear of leaving behind the attention Egypt gives its domestic players, finding a second chance in Switzerland with FC Basel, who took him in 2012 and turned him from a fast teenager who could dart past defenders into a mature player who scored decisive goals, including ones that hurt London’s Chelsea.
This helped carry him to England for the first time in January 2014, when Chelsea manager José Mourinho bought him, but the club were less patient than the situation required, and Salah was not about to stagnate on the substitutes’ bench. He found a second chance at Fiorentina in Italy, where he impressed. After six months, fellow Italian side Roma bought him and he moved to the Italian capital under the gaze of Francesco Totti, the club’s enduring icon.
With Roma as he approached 25, Salah discovered that the speed that carried him past his peers in youth centres and age group pitches could also make him a goalscorer, but he wanted a second chance in England. It did not take long to arrive. Liverpool, one of England’s most successful clubs, wanted Salah to help restore them to the summit of the domestic game after a period in the doldrums, made worse for the parallel success during the same period of Liverpool’s eternal rival, Manchester United.
