Spot Salah — Hidden Football

With the good fortune of having friends with like-minded football tourism ambitions, I was joined on my trip by old friend and ‘Footy Addict’ Danny, and Mariwan, friend and fellow ‘Footy Addict’. We were staying with a friend and colleague of theirs, Amro, a Cahrawi (someone from Cairo) born and bred, who offered to tour us around the city and take us to the games.

We were lucky enough to explore parts of the city, a thriving, chaotic blend of sights and sounds, filled with some of the most welcoming and friendly people I’ve met. From the ancient Masjid (mosque) squares and intertwining market streets, to the skyscrapers and highways of New Cairo, football was impossible to ignore.

Egypt’s flag hung from buildings around the city, with surely thousands of red, white and black replica football shirts worn on the streets every day (despite the home nation’s early departure from the tournament).

Our first Salah sighting - in the Egyptian Museum gift shop, the first of many.

One man in particular, Mohammed Salah, seemed the publicly proclaimed King of Cairo, his face and name replicated more times than I could possibly describe. Despite not hailing from the city himself (he’s from Nagrig, a small Northern village), he seems to be the face of both the capital and the country at the moment.

We played ‘Spot Salah’ (a footballing adaptation of Where’s Wally) during one evening at the markets, and found a treasure trove of merch - see the photos below to choose your favourite.

Alongside the visible fan culture and commercial focus on the sport, football was clearly played a lot, and taken very seriously. Friends told us stories of the old school Cairo teams, Al Ahly and Al Zamalek, steeped in histories intertwined with politics and change in the city.

Salah himself was famously snubbed by the Cairo based Arab Contractors team in the early days of his career, whose stadium sits amongst the city’s brown and white spiky skyline of flats, mosques and billboards.

The grassroots game was clearly thriving, and we had the chance to play a handful of fiercely competed games against Cairo teams. The language barrier made for some mysterious interactions and interpreting, with a visible Egyptian flair and passion consistent features of all our matches... Or, as our host Amro put it: 'Everyone here just plays like they're Mo Salah' - clearly his influence spreads beyond the billboards and market stalls onto Cairo's pitches.

All this aside, our primary focus was the Afcon matches. Despite the clunky and fairly useless online platform, we managed to secure tickets to one of the Semi Finals and the Final itself, both games due to take place at Cairo International Stadium, Egypt’s national arena.