Mo Salah has been shaping Liverpool FC for seven years

Three years ago, Mohamed Salah received a special award: his career as a footballer, which he began in Europe at FC Basel between winter 2012 and winter 2014, was integrated into the English textbooks of his home country Egypt. This honor has so far only been given to a very few Egyptians, such as the two Nobel Prize winners Naguib Mahfouz (literature) and Ahmed Zewail (chemistry). In primary school, the content revolves around Salah’s achievements at Liverpool FC, while in secondary school the texts deal with his social commitment and status as a national hero at home.

“Salah’s desire to help others comes from the fact that he wants to give young people a chance to succeed,” says the school literature. He is a “role model for millions of Egyptians,” who have therefore given him the nickname “happiness maker.” And how he has made his 95 million compatriots happy so far: Salah, 32, is the most famous footballer in Egypt, as well known as the pyramids of Giza. With his achievements he has improved the country’s battered image. The offensive player also led the national team to the 2018 World Cup, their first participation since 1990.

He won every major title with Liverpool

And the Swiss are also proud of Salah: They consider him to be the greatest export to ever play in the Super League. The Germans Günter Netzer and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge only came to Switzerland towards the end of their careers. From Basel, Salah went to Chelsea FC for the then Swiss record transfer fee of 16.5 million euros. He was initially unable to assert himself there and was loaned out – also to AS Roma, who finally signed him in 2016. But just a year later, Liverpool FC brought Salah back to the Premier League for 42 million euros.

 

Since then, Salah has helped the Merseyside club win all relevant titles in club football with 311 goals in 359 competitive games. With the club he won the Champions League, the Club World Cup (both in 2019) and the Premier League championship title in 2020. With 161 goals, he is one of the top ten goalscorers in the top English league; In 2019 he also became top scorer. And since he replaced Ivorian Didier Drogba three years ago, Salah has also become the top African goalscorer. Every year he always managed at least 23 goals – a consistency that only Harry Kane achieved at Tottenham Hotspur in England.

This season, Salah has already confirmed his exceptional level again. The left-footed player is the club’s totem; his eleven assists in ten competitive games ensured a smooth coaching change from Jürgen Klopp to Arne Slot. Liverpool are currently top of the league and started the Champions League with two wins.

Salah’s hit rate kept getting better

Salah is a mixture of goalscorer and winger, his regular position is right winger. His signing was based on analysis software from Liverpool FC, which measures attackers’ probability of scoring based on their routes, passes and shots. Ian Graham, the club’s former data analyst, reported to the New York Times that Salah met “all the criteria,” so to speak. For the club he was in a way the last missing tip in the attacking trident with the center forward Roberto Firmino and the left winger Sadio Mané.

Klopp then focused his high-speed football on the aforementioned trio. The strategy fit perfectly with a quote from coaching legend Bill Shankly, who once said football was like a piano: it needed eight people to carry it in and three to play it. Nobody in Liverpool plays as well as Salah, he combines the skills of his former teammates – Mané’s drive and determination as well as Firmino’s wit and elegance. The fans adore him with a chant in which they honor him as the “Egyptian king”. It says about the will-o’-the-wisp who darts up and down the sideline and can hardly be separated from the ball: “Mo Salah / Running down the wing / Mo Salah la-la-la la-ahh, The Egyptian King”.

Salah immediately gave his approval to the song, he said he loved it as much as the atmosphere at Anfield. When he once visited Liverpool with Chelsea FC, Salah admitted shortly after the transfer to Liverpool that he wanted to play for this club one day. He became the crowd’s favorite at Anfield in April 2018: he enchanted in the Champions League semi-final – Simsalahbim! – his former club Roma almost alone – with two goals and two assists in Liverpool’s exhilarating 5-2.

“I would never have believed him to have a world career, nor that he would one day become top scorer,” admits Alex Frei in an interview with the NZZ. Switzerland’s record goalscorer once played with Salah at FC Basel. At that time, he already had “amazing potential and intuitively did a lot of things right,” says Frei. But he showed “no signs of being a goalscorer”; his playing was wild and without structure. This is also how Markus Steinhöfer sees it, who told the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” that one catch followed the next with Salah – until the ball was gone. The former FCB defender says he can’t remember Salah “even shooting on goal in the beginning,” not even in training.

But Salah has an iron will and unbridled discipline. He demonstrated both at the age of 14 when he took a two-and-a-half-hour bus ride along gravel roads from his home village of Basyoun to the capital Cairo five times a week to train with the Arab Contractors SC club. His breakthrough came with the Egyptian U-23 team in a test match against FC Basel in preparation for the 2012 Olympic Games. In the second half, he scored two goals after coming on as a substitute – whereupon FCB immediately signed him.

Despite the language barrier and change of culture, Salah “immediately integrated” into the team, says Frei. He liked Salah from the start. Because he was open, respectful, humble, accessible, capable of learning and up for fun, says the former Swiss national player. Salah has retained these qualities to this day. He worked like a man possessed on his talent and improved his goal tally: in Basel he scored in 25 percent of the games, for AS Roma in 40 percent – at Liverpool his rate is currently 60 percent.

In Egypt, streets and institutions are named after him

The basis for his remarkable stay at the top of the world is his impressive fitness. Although he is sometimes harshly attacked by his opponents, Salah has never been out injured for long. He suffered the most serious injury in the lost Champions League final in 2018, when he dislocated his shoulder and was then only able to play to a limited extent in the following World Cup for Egypt.

At that time, Real defender Sergio Ramos pulled him to the ground martial arts style. He told the men’s magazine “GQ”, for which Salah answered some questions collected from internet forums years ago, that he attached great importance to work-out, stabilization and nutrition. He mainly practices with fitness bands because they work deep into the muscles. Weights, on the other hand, would only slow down his movements.

His meticulousness, modesty and successes make Salah a role model for his compatriots. The divided and highly flammable Egypt always seems to be able to agree on him as a common denominator. Salah was a clever boy and was always aware that he had a debt to the nation because of his status, Frei believes. Acting like an idiot in public would not be compatible with this standard. And in fact, there are no known scandals from Salah, who is a devout Muslim and thanks God after every goal. He rarely gives interviews and almost never comments controversially on anything.

In Salah’s birthplace, institutions and streets are now named after him. According to the political magazine “The Economist”, more than a million people voted for Mohamed Salah in the 2018 presidential elections in Egypt. They crossed out the candidates listed on the ballot papers – and wrote their favorite footballer over them instead.