A week from now, the emotions of Anfield a distant speck in his rear-view mirror, Mohamed Salah will step across the running track of the Adrar Stadium in Agadir. Treading gingerly, he’ll make his initial assessment of the state of the Moroccan pitch. It’s a quiet Salah ritual always worthy of careful study at the beginning of an Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon).
If the surface feels true underfoot, hope will soar that Africa’s showpiece tournament, the biennial event that gets hustled into random corners of the football calendar, can truly benefit from the full, thrilling Salah repertoire. But if the turf feels too soft and the passes Salah exchanges with his Egypt colleagues in the warm-ups for the group B opener against Zimbabwe on December 22 glide less smoothly than intended, hope would retreat that this may finally be the year when the so-called Pharaohs, the most decorated national team in Afcon history, make Salah part of that legacy.
The 35th Afcon, which begins on December 21, will be Salah’s fifth with Egypt, whom he captains and whose record of seven titles is too far ahead of the nearest challenger to be overtaken before at least 2029. But it’s a record that has assumed an exasperating peculiarity in the past decade. No country has won the title more times this century than Egypt; yet in none of those three post-millennium trophy-lift pictures do you see the most globally recognised Egyptian sportsman of the 21st century.
Salah also suffered searing heartache against Cameroon in the 2017 final
ULRIK PEDERSEN/ICON SPORT/GETTY
Each shortfall in turn becomes a national melodrama. There were the two losing finals, the first when a resourceful Salah overcame testing conditions — there were some very poor pitches at the Gabon 2017 tournament — to push Egypt to a silver medal, defeated 1-0 by Cameroon in the final. Two editions later an agonising penalty shoot-out in Cameroon ended with the Senegal of Sadio Mané, a Liverpool colleague of Salah at the time, snatching the title.
In between, there was the crushing anticlimax of Cairo 2019, when the hosts, taking care to tailor high-spec pitches to Salah’s uninhibited speed, switches of direction and precise passing, exited before the quarter-final stage, ambushed by an unremarkable South Africa side. Two winters ago the saga reached a noisy nadir, Salah leaving Ivory Coast after two chaotic group-stage draws, withdrawn with a hamstring problem at half-time of match day two, amid mutterings of betrayal because he chose to start his treatment for the injury back in Liverpool. He never returned to that Afcon, because Egypt were out at the round of 16, having won none of their four games.
The build-up to this one again features noise from Liverpool, but it is distinct in that it’s not the standard hue and cry of a club and its fans grumbling about being deprived of a superstar because of Afcon’s intrusion on the domestic calendar. Nor are so many Egyptians fearing Salah will play timidly, with half an eye on being fit and ready to be at his peak for Liverpool as soon as the tournament is over. The dynamic has altered since Salah spoke out against the Liverpool head coach, Arne Slot, on December 6; his hold on a starting XI place at Anfield is less certain than it has almost ever been, and his future there conspicuously finite.
Salah has been accused by some Egypt fans of playing timidly due to Liverpool commitments
ZIAD AHMED/NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES
All of which stirs optimism among millions of compatriots that Salah’s undiluted focus now is to seize perhaps his best last chance, at 33, of adding a major international prize to his dazzling club resumé. “The feeling is, yes, this [Liverpool] crisis can drive him forward with Egypt,” says Amr Nageeb Fahmy, author of The Pharaohs’ Hegemony, an excellent book chronicling Egypt’s domination of African football until 2010 and detailing the plunges of the period since. “But as with anything related to Salah, there’s a split in opinion. Some Egyptians feel he’s often feared getting injured with the national team, avoided heavy collisions and now criticise him because, while he has preached a lot about professionalism and creating the right mentality in Egypt, that might contradict his latest actions at Liverpool. But the majority are backing him.”
Those who have seen, at close hand, Salah’s rollercoaster journey with Egypt — the near-misses at two Afcon finals; the aggravated shoulder injury that hampered his only World Cup so far, in 2018 — sometimes despair at the suffocating expectations. “The anger and aggression Salah has had to deal with when Egypt haven’t gone all the way in tournaments is very, very high,” Mohamed Ghoraba, Egypt’s team manager at the 2024 Afcon, says with a sigh.
That posture, Ghoraba adds, forgets all Salah gave Egypt as a pathfinder, a driven teenager who made his way from a provincial village and an upbringing of few privileges, who broke into the national team via neither of the Cario superclubs, Al-Ahly or Zamalek, and did so at a time of sudden, violent instability across Egypt. Salah was 18 when he made his 2011 debut for an Egypt team still calling themselves the continent’s champions, thanks to a third successive Afcon title the previous year. By February 2012, amid political turbulence, Egypt’s status was tumbling. The domestic league, then Africa’s strongest, was cancelled after a mismanaged stadium disaster in Port Said that took 74 lives. For the best part of six more years, fans were mostly barred from attending games.
Salah left the 2024 tournament early with a hamstring injury
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All that accelerated Salah’s journey to Europe — to Basel, Chelsea, Fiorentina, Roma and then Liverpool — and to becoming, in the gloom of Egypt’s fallen status, a beacon. “What he did was open doors,” Ghoraba told me, “and show there is no such thing as ‘impossible’. In the past we sometimes had difficulties trusting ourselves to realise our full potential. The way Salah reached the top changed that. He had to fight for everything from day one and those who came after him know that: it has a big effect on younger players and on families who can more clearly see a future in football for their children.”
Ghoraba points to Omar Marmoush, 26, of Manchester City, as a clear beneficiary of Salah’s “role model” influence: “They recognise one another as a top player and they link up well.” While the squad heading to Morocco may lean quite heavily on its veterans, its attacking potential, with Marmoush as foil to Salah, matches any of the Egypt teams of Ghoraba’s Afcon odyssey.
The host nation will start as favourites, a Morocco buoyed by having set a new bar for Africa in reaching the semi-finals of the 2022 World Cup and enjoying extravagant investment in football infrastructure prior to this Afcon and their joint staging of the 2030 men’s World Cup. It’s a tournament that wants to show off fine arenas and, it is promised, give nobody any reason to diminish the event because of poor pitches. All the better, then, for the most quick-footed, skilful African of his generation, for Salah to believe he can do for Egypt what he has done, again and again, for Liverpool.
Africa Cup of Nations
Tournament starts: December 21
Egypt’s first match: v Zimbabwe, December 22, 9pm
