Your alarm goes off. It’s pitch black. The sun hasn’t even thought about rising over the Nile Delta yet, and you’re already awake, because today is a training day, and a training day means the buses.
You are Mohamed Salah. You are 14 years old. And what you are about to do, most grown adults couldn’t survive for a week. You’ll do it for years.
Before sunrise: the alarm in Nagrig
You live in Nagrig, a small farming village in Egypt’s Gharbia Governorate, in the Nile Delta, roughly 80 to 90 miles from Cairo. Most families here live close to the poverty line. A career in elite football isn’t a realistic dream, it’s something that happens on the television, not in the dusty alleyways outside your window where you spend hours copying the moves you saw Totti and Zidane make in the Champions League.
You get up in the dark. The house is quiet. Somewhere in this village your father is already thinking about the journey ahead of you, the one he keeps telling you is worth it. You get ready. There’s no time to waste, because the clock on this day started the moment your eyes opened.
Morning: school, but only just
You go to school. But not really. Not properly.
You show up for the first couple of hours because you have to, then you leave, because you have somewhere far more important to be. Your grades are suffering badly and it worries your parents, who wanted a conventional career for you. Reading and writing were never your thing. Football is the only thing that has ever fully held your attention, and the academy in Cairo, Al Mokawloon Al Arab, has given you a place.
The problem was never talent. A scout came to watch a completely different boy at a tournament and left unable to take his eyes off you instead. The problem is simply this: getting there. And getting there is a full-time job on its own.
Late morning to afternoon: the four buses
You leave. And the journey begins.
Four and a half hours. Each way. You board the first bus. Then a second. Then a third. Then a fourth. On some days a fifth. These aren’t comfortable coaches with a timetable and a seat reserved for you. These are Egyptian microbuses, crammed with strangers, no fixed arrival time, crawling and stopping and starting across the Delta and then grinding through the chaos of Cairo’s traffic.
Some days the heat is unbearable. Other days the dust drifts in through the open windows and settles on your skin, in your hair, on your clothes. Every single change is a test. Every leg is another wait at another roadside with no guarantee of when the next bus comes. Putting a specific time on it is pointless, because a nine-hour round trip can swing from the merely difficult to the completely irrational in a heartbeat, depending on the traffic, the breakdowns, the sheer unpredictability of it all.
You do this five days a week. Up to nine hours of travelling, every single day, just for the right to train.
Afternoon: you arrive exhausted, and you train anyway
You get there drained before you’ve even seen a football. Your legs are stiff from hours on cramped seats. You’re covered in the dust of four buses. And now, in this state, you’re expected to compete.
So you do. You give the session everything, because this is the entire point. This is the dream you’re bleeding for. And it’s not even a level playing field. You’re smaller than the other boys. Your muscles haven’t filled out yet. Your body simply hasn’t caught up to what you can do with a ball, and people keep telling you that you’re too slight, too slender, that you won’t make it.
When the coaches finally clock your ability, they realise your frame is the thing holding you back, so the club builds you a special diet and a conditioning plan just to help you survive the physicality of older, bigger players. You train harder than anyone, because you have to make up for a journey that’s already taken half of what you’ve got before you started.
Evening: the dressing room, and the tears
Then it’s over, and you turn around and do the entire nightmare again in reverse. Four more hours of buses. Home in the dark.
And some nights, in the dressing room, before that return journey, it breaks you. You cry. The homesickness. The exhaustion. The loneliness of being a 14-year-old boy so far from home, doing something this hard, with no promise at the end of it that any of it will work. There are times you seriously consider giving up. Any sane person would.
And then your father gives you the words that anchor you for the rest of your life. He tells you that everyone who became a big name suffered a lot first. That every great player has to sacrifice. It’s the line you’ll carry through Basel, through Chelsea, through Roma, all the way to Anfield and beyond. “I was young,” you’ll say years later, “and I wanted to be a footballer.” You wanted to be a big name. Something special. So you wipe your face, and you get back on the bus.
Night: home late, then the alarm again
You get home late. Worn to nothing. The village is dark and quiet, exactly as it was when you left it before sunrise, except now you’ve crossed the country and back and left everything you had on a training pitch in Cairo.
You eat. You sleep. Because you know exactly what’s coming. The alarm is going to go off before the sun again, and you are going to stand up and do every single part of this all over again. The school you barely attend. The four buses. The dust. The heat. The training. The tears, maybe. The four buses home.
Again tomorrow. And the day after. And the one after that.
What that journey actually built
Most 14-year-olds would have quit after the first week. Plenty would have quit after the first day. Salah did it for years, and it built the most decorated Egyptian footballer in history, a Premier League and Champions League winner, Liverpool’s all-time leading Premier League scorer, and a national symbol so beloved that a food joint in Cairo renamed itself “Liverfool” in his honour.
He never forgot the village that made him. He’s since built hospitals, schools and mosques in Nagrig, funded emergency oxygen supplies during the pandemic, and given a new generation of kids in the Delta something he never had: proof that the television dream can actually be real.
But it started with a boy, an alarm in the dark, and a chain of buses nobody would blame him for refusing to board.
Would you have made that journey once? Let alone every single day, for years, chasing a dream that nobody, not one single person, ever promised would come true?
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