Above the entrance to Al Mokawloon Al Arab's youth academy in Nasr City, eastern Cairo, hangs the image of a boy who grew into one of football's greatest success stories. For those who walk through those gates today, Mohamed Salah's face serves as both inspiration and reminder of the price paid for greatness.
Long before he became a Premier League icon and Liverpool's record goalscorer, Salah was a 14-year-old boy from the village of Nagrig, enduring a grueling nine-hour round trip five days a week just to train. His journey required at least four separate buses each way: from a junction near his village to Basyoun, then onward to Tanta, followed by a roughly 100-kilometer haul into the chaos of Cairo's Ramses Square, and finally a connection to Nasr City. On days without luck, he finished with a near two-kilometer run up a steep hill to make his session on time.
Hamdi Nouh, Salah's first coach at Al Mokawloon and a figure he has called his "second father," said the young Salah possessed a rare combination of qualities. "He was ready to sacrifice everything, he wanted to work hard, and liked to learn," Nouh said.
The daily grind meant packed microbuses, uncertain schedules, and money that covered only the exact fare needed—Salah was too respectful of his father to ask for extra, even without any margin for error. Yet he later revealed that he never viewed the experience as a burden. "I didn't feel tired travelling when I was young," Salah said in 2022. "It's because I was doing something I wanted, chasing a dream I had to reach. I wasn't seeing my situation, I was seeing my goal. These are days I sit and think about, I'll never forget them and I still smile now when I remember everything."
For his mother, Umm Mohamed, the situation was far more distressing. She worried constantly about her eldest son traveling such distances on dangerous roads, and one accident along his route left her frantic, calling his phone more than 20 times without answer—he had simply fallen asleep from the journey. His father, Salah Ghaly, a government administrator who also traded in jasmine, financed his son's path through youth clubs in Basyoun and Tanta before the move to Al Mokawloon, despite his own reservations about the dangers of the big city.
Ghamri Abdel-Hameed el-Saadani, who coached Salah in the juniors at the academy, recalled the raw talent evident even at eight years old. "He was small, but his left foot and his shots were powerful," el-Saadani said. "He was fast and could do things with the ball the other boys couldn't."
One lesser-known chapter of Salah's story unfolded when a planned overnight stay at a teammate's uncle's house fell through. Left without lodging in an unfamiliar part of Cairo, the pair briefly considered staying near a cemetery before finding a solution: sneaking into the Al Mokawloon grounds with the help of an on-site administrator. Salah used his shoes as a pillow, slept behind the steel gates, and set an alarm for 6am so they could leave undetected before returning later as if they had just arrived. The arrangement later shifted to sleeping outdoors on one of the training pitches to avoid detection near the entrance.
The hardship eventually gave way to a defining moment when Salah, at 18, was promoted to the first team and allowed to live in the club's residences. "Not everyone could stay there, so psychologically I felt like I became someone, like a star," Salah recalled. "I used to see players finish training and go upstairs, while I would leave to take the journey back to Nagrig. I'd think, 'One day I'll go up there'."
He would go on to surpass every expectation, becoming the most successful Egyptian footballer in history and a global superstar—proof that the boy who once slept behind a steel gate never lost sight of the goal that carried him through those grueling years.
Based on reporting from The Guardian.