Mo Salah’s name has been on the lips of every football fanatic in the past few years-most recently because he has won the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) Player of the Year award for the 2017-18 season and the 5-2 thrashing of AS Roma on Tuesday night.
This is one of England’s most prestigious football awards. And it did not come easy for Salah.
He came into the limelight in 2010 during his Egyptian Premier League debut as a substitute for El Mokawloon football club. He then moved to Swiss side Basel following the Egyptian government’s cancellation of the season after the Port Said Stadium disaster that saw the death of 74 people and injuries to more others.
He has been on the rise since then.
Photo: Liverpool FC Instagram
He made his English premier league debut in 2014, playing for Chelsea before going to Italy’s Fiorentina and later Roma. He eventually moved back to England in 2017, this time playing for Liverpool FC.
Called the Pharaoh, Salah has quite transformed the game in many ways that saw him awarded a number of honours. He has also made quite a number of firsts for an African player in England and Europe, including being the first African player in history to score at least nine goals in a single European Cup/Champions League season.
He is the only Liverpool player to score in the past five Champion League’s game and has the most goals by any player in Europe’s top leagues with 43 goals.
He also scored the most goals in a 38-game premier league season with 31 goals- a feat he shares with Christiano Ronaldo, Luis Suarez and Alan Shearer. He is also the only African player with the most goals.
Aside from that, he has also won the Premier League Player of the Month three times in a single season.
Aside from the PFA player of the year, Mo Salah is also the 2017 African Footballer of the Year and the 2017 BBC African Footballer of the Year.
Already, there have been calls that Salah should be awarded the Ballon d’Or. If he wins he’ll be the second African player to win the award after current Liberian president George Weah.
At Liverpool, he has won the hearts of the fans, who have created a chant ‘good enough’ for the Egyptian player.
