Chasing Salah

Despite his consistency, his achievements and more-so, his visibility, he has never written an autobiography and a biography has never been written about him. He remains an enigmatic figure. We barely know how his teammates really feel about him and we do not know what he thinks of them. We do not really know about the world around him: how the events of the past decade in Egypt have impacted on his own life. We barely know what really motivates him. And we also know very little about where he is heading: whether a deal to join the exodus of high level European-based footballers in Saudi Arabia really interests him. This biography seeks to answer those questions by attempting to speak to the people who know him best through a mixture of on-record and off-record interviews. A definitive biography to remember.

Simon Hughes is a Merseyside based senior writer with the Athletic, whom he joined from the Independent upon its launch in the United Kingdom in 2019. In 2022, he won the North West football journalist of the year award. He is the author of seven books about Liverpool FC as well as There She Goes, a modern social history of Liverpool as a city. In 2014, Red Machine won the Antonio Ghirelli Prize for Italian Soccer Foreign Book of the Year.