RIYAD MAHREZ

Leicester’s amazing season is thanks in no small part to Riyad Mahrez – but the Premier League Player of the Year contender hasn’t had it easy

Tears trickled down the cheeks of a skinny 18-year-old as his manager broke the news. The young Riyad Mahrez wasn’t expecting this: a teenager, hundreds of miles from home, seeing his dreams of becoming a footballer snatched away.

It was 2009 and Quimper, an amateur team in France’s fourth tier, had decided that the tricky winger, who just under seven years later would be leading the most unlikely of Premier League title assaults with Leicester City, wasn’t good enough for them. Or so it seemed.

Manager Ronan Salaun, a wily former pro, had liked what he’d seen of Mahrez on a July trial day featuring more than 20 other players, but he had been fighting a losing battle trying to convince the club’s powers that this spindly young wideman was worth the bare minimum €750-per-month contract. By September, however, after he’d been playing for a month, they’d caved. Mahrez was the only player Quimper signed from that trial day.

The Algeria international recalls that period vividly when Fourfourtwo meets him at the King Power Stadium, the setting for many of the 25-year-old’s dazzling highlights as one of the Premier League’s standout players this season.

“They said: ‘We can’t [sign you], because we’d have to give you a good contract and we don’t know if you deserve that’,” Mahrez recalls with a knowing smile. “I’d been with them for one month by then – I didn’t know how they could say that. They didn’t say it in the beginning. I had got used to playing with the team. They said they wanted to keep me but would have to check with the boss to see if he agreed. They spoke with him… and he did.”

Mahrez joined Quimper alongside Mathias Pogba, younger brother of Juventus dynamo Paul and future Crewe Alexandra striker, who became his flatmate in an apartment provided by the French club. First, though, Mahrez was sent to play with their seventh-tier B team. It seemed they still weren’t entirely convinced.

“He was a street player who had taught himself football in his neighbourhood,” recalled former coach Mickael Pellen. “It was both an advantage and a disadvantage: good because he was an excellent dribbler, comfortable with both feet and already very good at set-pieces, but a disadvantage because on a tactical level he knew nothing.”

Mahrez’s unquestionable technical ability had seen him this far, but Quimper were concerned about his slight frame and knew he needed toughening up. To Mahrez, it was merely a mildly annoying continuation of what doubters had always told him.

“I used to play with older boys, always,” the Foxes trickster tells FFT. “When I was 15 or 16 I’d play with 20-year-olds, and when I was 20, maybe with 25-year-olds. It helped me. It does not make me sad or anything, looking back.

“How did I prove them wrong? Just with my ability, my quality. They would say those things, then we’d play a game, I’d play well