MO SALAH SHINES ON AND OFF THE FIELD
Liverpool fans are singing his praises, embracing Islam,
MOHAMED Salah has never had a season like this one. He’s scored 32 goals in 38 games in his first year with Liverpool and has the Reds in third place in the premier league standings.
That production has Liverpool fans literally singing his praises.
“If he’s good enough for you/He’s good enough for me,” Liverpool supporters shout in a new song in Salah’s honour. “If he scores another few/Then I’ll be Muslim too!”
Salah is one of the more well-known Muslim players in England, and certainly the talk of the premier league since Liverpool paid £34 million (more than R554m) in a transfer fee from Italy’s AS Roma last summer. He’s also very outward with his faith, often bowing in prayer after scoring goals.
That’s what makes this new song – in which fans sing of following Salah to mosque after he scores – so surprisingly welcome to experts who follow international soccer.
British fans are notoriously the most poorly behaved in the world, according to statistics kept by FARE Network (formerly Football Against Racism in Europe), a London-based non-profit that studies discrimination in soccer.
It analysed 1 378 soccer matches during the 2015-16 and 2016-17 seasons and recorded 539 incidents of racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, nationalist and Islamophobic nature, according the group’s monthly reports.
British fans were responsible for 59 of those incidents, more than any other country.
And then along came Salah, and fans have quite literally changed their tune.
“This is the first time I’ve seen such an exuberant, overt, positive appreciation that includes (a player’s) religion,” FARE executive director Piara Powar said.
Liverpool fans have taken to affectionately calling Salah, a native of Egypt, “The Pharaoh” or “The Egyptian King”. There have been other songs, too: “He’s running down the wing,” one goes. “Egyptian king!”
“We brought the lad from Roma and
This is the first time I’ve seen such an exuberant, overt, positive appreciation
he scores in every game,” starts another. “He’s Egyptian and he’s brilliant and Mohamed’s his name!”
It’s another case of a simple truth in professional sports, Piara said: winning makes everybody feel good. Salah is playing very well, which excites fans, making them more apt to accept his ethnic and religious background when they may have not before.
“Good players break down barriers,” Piara said.
“We know that an appreciation of someone as a player does lead to a look into their identity and, for many fans, an acceptance of their identity.”
It’s easy to go overboard about songs like this, Piara cautioned. A broad social movement is not solely made up of happy soccer fans, but this certainly helps. – Washington Post