Salah: The King of Charity

Earlier this month, Mohamed Salah came second in the race to become the next Egyptian president. The reelected winner, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, had gathered ninety-two percent of the votes, after his rivals had pulled out or been jailed. Disillusioned by the lack of options, more than a million people scribbled down the name of a shy footballer who had never said much about politics, let alone announced his candidacy. “Mohamed is a role model for this country,” Marwan Jalal Eissa, a fan from Salah’s village, explained to The Independent. So popular has Salah become in Egypt that, had he taken part in the election, you wonder if he might actually have won it.

Streets, schools and institutions have been named in his honour. Salah is the footballer with the biggest social media following in Africa, with seventeen million. In Cairo, fans in replica shirts flood cafés to watch him play. “They only care about Salah,” one fan told The Independent. “Liverpool could be winning 3-0 and they’ll watch in silence, but if Salah scores the fourth, they’ll go crazy.” And if he’s taken off? “We change the channel,” laughed cafe manager Sherif Nasr in conversation with Middle East Eye (MEE). “He is one of us,” Amr Mostafa, who watches all his games, told MEE. “He suffered like us. He faced the same difficulties and barriers that we face, but he was persistent and succeeded.”

Cairo was the last place Salah played club football in Egypt. His team there were El Mokawloon, also known as Arab Contractors, whom he joined at fourteen. He was still living in his childhood village, so he’d travel five hours to training each way. He’d go to school at 7am and leave at 9am, clutching an official paper that said, ‘Mo can leave school early so he can reach the club at 2pm to train’. En route to Cairo, he’d take up to five busses. Then he’d train, before making the same journey back. At 10pm he’d get home, eat, sleep, and then awake to do it all again. He kept up that schedule five times a week for three years.

At the Arab Contractors youth team, Salah started out as a left-back. In one game, which they won 4-0, he got five one-on-ones with the ‘keeper—and missed them all. Afterwards, he broke down in tears.

“He only had two hours to train a day,” his youth coach, Said El-Shishini, told the radio program Stad El-Hadaf. “He was getting consumed, physically and mentally.” The village Salah kept travelling back to was Nagrig, where he grew up in a three-storey house overlooking a dirt road. He had started playing football at seven or eight. “I was a normal child,” Salah told Marca. “I was on the street all day. I loved football, that’s what I always had in my head.” He idolised Francesco Totti, Zinédine Zidane and the Brazilian Ronaldo. “Players who played with magic,” he said.

Salah went on to join a team in nearby Basyoun, then in Tanta. One day a scout invited him to train with Arab Contractors. One story says the scout had come to see another player, only to spot Salah. Yet Salah had no idea whether he’d make it as a professional. At the Arab Contractors youth team, he was the third-choice left-back. By his own admission, he was a poor student, and his family could not afford a proper education. He had no escape route should he fail.

“He only played the second half, but I had never seen a player with so much speed in my entire life.”

“It was a difficult time,” Salah said. “But I was young and I wanted to be a footballer. I wanted to be a big name. I wanted to be something special. I cannot promise you that it was clear to me what I would become, and I was like, ‘I will be something special’. No, it was not like this. I was coming from nothing, a fourteen-year-old kid with a dream. I didn’t know it would happen. I just wanted it to happen so badly.”

Then came the day when he missed those chances and cried. Analysing the game, El-Shishini felt the distance Salah had to run from left-back to the goal left him exhausted when he was about to shoot. So he decided to play him as a right winger. “I told him he’d be the team’s top scorer in both leagues, the U-16 Cairo League and the U-17 Nationwide League,” El-Shishini told The Bleacher Report. By the end of the season, Salah had scored thirty-five goals.

At sixteen, Salah made the first team. “At that moment I told myself it was my chance,” he told Marca. He began doing extra training. Coaches describe him as disciplined and punctual. “Mohamed was willing to sacrifice everything,” Hamdi Nooh told The Daily Mail. Nooh told him to use his right foot more. “OK, sir!” Salah would reply. Nooh also encouraged Salah’s father to keep a personal timetable: get up early, no late-night TV. Salah followed it. “He lived as he should,” said Nooh. “He would pray and then go to sleep early. I am not the man who made him, but I know he listened to me. He listened to everyone.”

Soon Salah was playing regularly. In 2011, Bob Bradley handed him his senior international debut. “You realised how special he was,” Bradley told Sports Illustrated. “So explosive, so quick. Still raw, but wanted to learn, smart… And he was so hungry to get better. He wanted to work on his finishing. When you showed him things in training, the next day you’d see him doing it without even thinking about it.”

That same year, Salah played in the U-20 African Youth Championship. Egypt came third, qualifying for the Olympics for the first time since 1992. In their last group game, against South Africa, Salah missed a series of chances. Again he began to cry. The coach, Diaa El Sayed, reacted by taking him to the training ground, where Salah would fire at goal in the rain. “He used to put himself in goal scoring positions by running through defenders and choosing the right places, but missed easy chances,” El Sayed told The Bleacher Report. “He challenged himself to change that—and he did.”

In February 2012, disaster hit Egyptian football. A mass riot in a game between Al-Masry and Al-Ahly killed seventy-four and injured hundreds. Egypt announced three days of national mourning. The season got cancelled. The Egypt U-23 side were preparing for the Olympics, so in March they played a friendly with Basel. The Swiss club were hunting a replacement for fan favourite Xherdan Shaqiri, who had joined Bayern Munich, and had been tracking Salah. According to KingFut, sporting director Georg Heitz said he had received glowing reviews from his scouts. “But then you think, ‘Well, he’s Egyptian, and we don’t know many success stories of Egyptian players coming to Europe’. We thought it was a risk to sign him at that point.”

Salah did not even start the game. But he came on at half-time to score twice. “It was freezing cold, but he was amazing,” Basel president Bernhard Heusler told Sky Sports. “He only played the second half, but I had never seen a player with so much speed in my entire life.”

Basel signed Salah in April. Expectations rose when he scored in all three group games at the Olympics, as Egypt made the quarter-finals. But success was not guaranteed. Salah was twenty. He had never lived outside Egypt. He spoke no English or German. He lived alone in a hotel, which had no TV channels he could understand. With no idea what to do, he just went for walks. “I said it wasn’t easy…” Salah told Marca. “But what was clear from the beginning was that I didn’t want to come back except as a top player. I knew I didn’t have the option to return. I didn’t see myself playing a couple of months in Europe and having to go back. That didn’t cross my mind.”

He took up an English course. Two months later, he could talk to his team-mates. He also got married around that time, and now has a baby daughter, named Makka, with his wife Magi. When he was not at home reading books or watching comedies, he honed his game. “What we quickly noticed was his desire to do the necessary work,” said striker Alex Frei, according to KingFut. “Every day he was prepared to put in the hard yards before and after training.”

Basel ended up winning the league. Salah played well and scored five goals in twenty-nine games, although it could have been more. While he kept doing extra finishing sessions, he also kept missing chances. “If he was calmer in [goalscoring] situations, there would be another zero on the end of his price tag,” said Heusler. Coach Murat Yakin said: “If Mohamed could score as well, he would not be here any more.” For his part, Salah just shrugged. “Sometimes the ball just doesn’t want to go in, no matter how often you try,” he said in 2013. “In five years’ time, maybe I will take those chances and score.”

In the Champions League next season, Salah scored home and away against Chelsea. In January, Chelsea decided they might as well sign him. When José Mourinho got asked what Salah would bring to the table, he said: “First of all, he won’t score against Chelsea.”

At that point Liverpool had been tracking Salah. They were due to sign him, but a late Mourinho phone call changed his mind. Yet the dream move turned into a nightmare for Salah. He started only six league games in his first season—and none at all in his second. Raw and adventurous, he lacked the defensive awareness of Willian, whom Mourinho favoured on the right flank. Salah might also have struggled with Mourinho’s leadership style, which can be cold and confrontational. “I think Mo is a really sensitive player who needs to have time and a good feeling from the trainer and the staff,” Yakin told BBC Sport. “In Chelsea, everything was probably too early for him, as well as too fast and too big.”

In February 2015, Chelsea sent Salah on loan to Fiorentina for the rest of the season. He chose shirt number seventy-four, in honour of the victims at Port Said. Once more, he had to acclimatise to a new country, a new league and a new language. Yet he became a hit in Florence. The press dubbed him the ‘Italian Messi’. He got a pizza named after him. Still, when La Viola activated a buyout clause in his contract, Salah rejected the move. In a tangled deal, he instead joined Roma on a one-year loan from Chelsea. When he struck fourteen league goals in his first year, Roma bought him. Improved by Luciano Spalletti, he went one better in his second year, hitting fifteen. In one game, analysts said he had sprinted seventy metres in seven seconds. “You need a moped to catch him,” Spalletti said.

In 2017, Salah followed up his club form by helping Egypt finish as runners-up in the Africa Cup of Nations. Back in Nagrig, new cafés opened so that fans could watch him play. According to The Independent, the fifteen thousand people in the village earn about £125 on average a month. Aware of their troubles, Salah has tried to help. According to various reports, he has set up a foundation that supports local families as well as Syrian refugees in the Gharbia Governorate, where the village is located. He has donated money to a religious centre. He has funded a building for ambulance services. He has bought equipment for a local gym. He has paid for an all-weather pitch at his old school. Elsewhere, he has helped cover the fee for a child’s bone marrow transplant surgery. After that, he made a donation to a children’s cancer hospital.

Whenever a chance arises, Salah returns to the village. “Nagrig are my people,” he told Marca. “I always feel happy when I return.” He sees children, family and old friends. “He plays table tennis and pool,” Bassyouni told The Daily Mail. “When he comes back, he signs every autograph, stands for every picture. He hasn’t changed.” Those at Basel got the same impression. “There are a few sportsmen like this,” Heusler told Sky Sports. “Roger Federer is another. They never forget where they are from. They are humble and respect the people who were involved in their pathway, even when they have gone on to bigger things. Maybe it’s no coincidence that it is the most successful people who are like that.”

In early 2017, when Liverpool realised Salah might be available, their scouts and directors pestered Klopp. According to reports, Klopp had initially wanted to sign Julian Brandt from Bayern Leverkusen. “They were really in my ear and were on it: ‘come on, come on, Mo Salah, he’s the solution!’” Klopp said. In June, the club announced the Salah deal for €39m.

They tried to break him in quickly. During pre-season in Germany, Salah underwent an initiation in which he had to pick up a microphone and sing for his team-mates. He chose a song from Egypt—in Arabic. “Nobody had any idea what it was,” a member of the audience told The Liverpool Echo. “Everyone was just looking at each other. It was pretty terrible.”

On the pitch, however, performances were good. By early April, Salah had scored twenty-nine league goals. It was more than or equal to seven teams in the division. Rather than playing out wide, Salah had become a poacher, lurking near the box, shooting more and passing less. Roberto Firmino had done more defensive work, and Sadio Mané had dropped deeper on the other flank. Extra training had helped. Yet that Salah would master such an advanced role had not been expected from the start. “Nobody could know,” said Klopp. “We learned it step by step.”

Liverpool fans dubbed Salah the ‘Egyptian King’. One carved an image of him in the hair in the back of his head. A new podcast, Oil Field Index, hosted by a London-based lawyer named Hatem Kadous, was set up for Arabic fans. A Liverpool restaurant offered free falafel hummus mezze for every goal Salah scored for the rest of the season. Vodafone Egypt promised customers eleven free minutes of talking time each time he scored. The Mirror found that Vodafone had forty-three million active subscribers in Egypt, and that the average price per minute was twenty-five pence. That meant every goal would cost the company more than £100m.

The press had harried Salah for interviews, had they not known how shy he is. In a Q&A with the official club channel, he answered twelve questions by using a hundred and nine words.

Salah has acted on his values. When he scored four goals against Watford, he apologised to the goalkeeper, Orestis Karnezis. Back in Egypt, he continues to use his fame and wealth to tackle social issues. In January, he sent £200,000 to a fund called ‘Long Live Egypt’ that is meant to boost the national economy. According to the BBC, he has donated €30,000 to the Association of Veteran Egyptian Players. This April, Salah also starred in his fourth advert for a national campaign driven by the Egyptian government called ‘Say No To Drugs’. In the video, a teenager rejects a group of youth using drugs in favour of friends who play football and music—and wins an approving smile from Salah. The video went viral. About a week later, Egypt Today reported, the social solidarity minister, Ghada Waly, said that eighty-eight percent of the views had come from people aged between eighteen and thirty-five. Waly also said the number of calls to the government hotline for addiction cure had risen by four hundred percent.

Why had Salah succeeded at Liverpool but failed at Chelsea? Some say he never really did fail—he was never given a chance. Others feel Klopp’s warm leadership style suits him better. Salah had also changed. When Klopp analysed him, he was surprised at how sturdy he had become. “He has certainly grown physically,” said Heinz, according to KingFut. “He was quite thin when we came to Basel.” Heinz also believes Salah has matured a lot, especially in Italy, where he refined his tactical understanding. Mourinho says the same. Did Salah feel it too? “A hundred percent, yes!” he said. “Even my personality was different. I was a kid—I was twenty or twenty-one. Now I’m four years older, everything is different.”

Klopp has also suggested Salah’s achievements with Egypt have fuelled his club form, a reference to their World Cup qualifier at home to Congo in October. Egyptians had little to celebrate until last year. Before making the final of the Africa Cup of Nations, Egypt, the tournament’s most successful team with seven titles, had failed to even qualify for it in 2012, 2013 and 2015. The rot had set in the same year as Port Said. All along, political turmoil had rocked the country following the 2011 revolution. But on 8 October 2017, fans crammed into the stadium at Borg El Arab knowing victory would seal their passage to the World Cup for the first time since 1990.

Salah scored the opener, but Arnold Bouka Moutou equalised for Congo with three minutes to go. Deep into stoppage time, Egypt got a penalty.

Salah stepped up.

“Words cannot explain it,” Marwan Ahmed, of KingFut, told The Sunday Times. “Ninety-fifth minute, a hundred thousand fans… You could feel a pin drop when he walked to the ball…”

“I nearly had a heart attack,” said Klopp

“We all trusted him,” the Egypt assistant coach, Mahmoud Fayez, told The Daily Mail. “The day before we played Congo, I called him. I told him, ‘You are the one for the penalty kick if we get one’. The first thing he did was practise. Three or four penalties. When he did it for real, it was amazing. The emotion was incredible.”

On domestic TV, the commentator’s voice cracked. In Egyptian homes, old men cried. After the final whistle, fans stormed the pitch and embraced the players. A couple kids ran up to Salah and hugged him. He was then hoisted up on someone’s shoulders and carried around the stadium.

In the aftermath, Salah was offered a villa by Mamdouh Abbas, the ex-president of Zamalek, for his heroics. He refused it and asked that the money be donated to Nagrig instead.

The following January, Salah became the first Egyptian to win the CAF African Player of the Year award since 1983. Come summer, he will try to bring more joy to his people, who have never seen Egypt win a World Cup game. “He’s carrying the hopes of ninety million people,” Kadous told The Sunday Times. “We’re having terrorist attacks every week. Economic trouble. He’s the only thing keeping Egyptians happy. Go to any coffee shop in Cairo when Liverpool are playing… it’s amazing. For ninety minutes he unites the nation and makes us forget all the crap we’re going through… He scores, we’re happy, we forget.”