Mohamed Salah and Egypt have never won a World Cup game. Is this their moment?
Take West Sunset Highway out of Spokane, and before cowboy country opens up, just beyond a strip of barbecue spots, truck washes and kennels, is the rather incongruous modern, glass-paneled hotel hosting the Egypt squad at the 2026 World Cup.
The setting has been chosen for logistical convenience.
The Northern Quest Resort and Casino is on one side of the road and on the other is Spokane’s airport, which offers easy passage to places including Seattle and Vancouver, the cities where Egypt will play its three group games over the next couple of weeks.
The planners at the Egyptian Football Association (EFA) believe the squad have everything they need in terms of facilities, with training taking place on Luger Field at Gonzaga University, close to the childhood home of Bing Crosby.
Yet it also affords Egypt’s players the type of space they enjoyed in Taghazout during their recent Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) campaign in Morocco, which ended at the semifinal stage with a 1-0 defeat to eventual champions Senegal.
Spokane might be five hours’ drive from Seattle but it is only an hour or so by plane, and in Group G – also featuring Belgium, New Zealand and Iran – Egypt will travel the shortest distance of any team at this tournament for their opening-phase matches.
Quietly, the Egyptians are confident. They arrive in the United States having compiled one of the best records in qualifying, and their star player Mohamed Salah has a point to prove (and a new club to find) after leaving Liverpool last month at the end of their season. In Spokane, he was welcomed by a few of the club’s supporters.
Yet history urges caution. Egypt’s record in World Cups is starkly bad when you consider it is the most successful country in the history of the AFCON, with seven titles.
Having qualified for the first World Cup in 1930, Egypt did not arrive in Uruguay, the host country, after storm delays meant it missed its nautical connection in Marseille. Four years later in Italy, Egypt became the first African or Arab nation to appear at the World Cup but failed to win a game, a record it maintained in 1990 and 2018. The Egyptians have never advanced to the knockout stages.
Ten African countries can better that record, with Cameroon, Ghana and Morocco – the first nation from the continent to reach the semifinals in 2022 – all enjoying far more recent success.
“I see the ambition in the players, they want to achieve more than what Egypt did in past World Cups,” head coach Hossam Hassan told reporters ahead of a 2-1 friendly defeat to Brazil last week in Cleveland, Ohio. “We need to perform better at the World Cup. This is my main goal.”
If Egypt are to achieve that, Salah will almost certainly be the pivotal figure.
Salah may have just endured his least productive season since 2014-15 (12 goals in all competitions for Liverpool) and is without a club, having left Anfield a year before his contract was due to expire.
Egypt’s chances tend to be formed around impressions of Salah, who is just two goals away from matching now-coach Hassan’s record as the national team’s all-time top scorer with 69.
There is an interesting dynamic between the pair because while Hassan is representative of a more traditional Egypt and a winner of three AFCON titles, Salah – the most famous footballer their country has ever produced – has enjoyed far more success with clubs abroad but is yet to lift a trophy with Egypt since his international debut in 2011.
Not so long ago, Hassan was one of Salah’s most notable critics in his prior role as a television pundit. This reached a height during the 2023 AFCON in Ivory Coast, where Egypt performed badly, exiting at the round of 16, and Salah sustained an injury in the second of their three group matches that looked like it might end his involvement in the competition.
When it was floated that Salah would go back to Liverpool for treatment before potentially returning to camp if Egypt made it to the latter stages, Hassan suggested he shouldn’t bother – implying that leaving, as captain, was as good as desertion. “Back here, we have men to do the job,” insisted Hassan, leaning on his own sense of masculinity, part of his appeal among older generations across Egypt.
Hassan, the footballer, was a centre-forward who had never been slow in coming forward with his opinions. Following a varied but moderately successful club coaching career which involved 16 different appointments, in 2024 he was selected by the EFA to lead the national team following the sacking of Portuguese Rui Vitoria.
While he was a popular choice, he was also a cheaper option; the Egyptian pound was plummeting, and the organisation did not have the funds to attract coaching talent from abroad.
Hassan, who is assisted by his brother Ibrahim as technical director, has since been far more positive about Salah. At that most recent AFCON in January, he described him in a press conference as “one of the best players in the world over the last 10 years” and someone who “possesses great ambition and a distinctive professional mentality”.
Salah later claimed the team’s AFCON camp in the seaside town of Taghazout, where the team hotel looked out on the Atlantic Ocean, was the “best” he’d experienced during his international career. Yet it was not enough to deliver the trophy, with Egypt exiting to Senegal in a semi-final where they had only 37 per cent possession and managed one shot on goal.
Salah turns 34 Monday the day Egypt face Belgium in Seattle in its opening game of this World Cup. Should he continue playing international football beyond this summer, he might get one final shot at lifting AFCON next year when the tournament is held in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Yet without a winners’ medal, he continues to be judged unfavorably against the hugely successful teams that preceded his own.
Egypt won three AFCON titles in a row between 2006 and 2010, but Salah entered the national setup at the beginning of a period of turbulence.
First came the Arab Spring, the revolution that swept across North African capital cities and into Cairo; then the 2012 Port Said stadium tragedy, where 74 people died and 500 were injured, leading to Egypt’s domestic league shutting down, long-lasting spectator bans and widespread financial uncertainty across the game. Egypt did not appear in three successive AFCONs.
As Salah began cementing his reputation in the European club game, Egypt were attempting to re-establish themselves. His fame, so much greater than any individual in the country’s sporting history, represented a separation from a golden era where Egypt’s biggest strength was widely perceived to be its sense of collectiveness.
Yet he was also integral to their best moments. In 2017, he scored crucial goals to deliver a first AFCON appearance in seven years and a first World Cup place since 1990, the latter sealed by a penalty against Congo deep into added time.
He is viewed both as a critical figure in the rebirth of Egyptian football, helping a conservatively minded country slowly realize what needs to happen if it is to be successful again, and an outlier who has not helped the Egypt team emulate their gilded past, despite his talent and reach.
It is worth reflecting on what went wrong when Egypt last qualified for a World Cup.
Salah, then 26, was at his peak following a sensational debut season with Liverpool, where he got 44 goals. But while he scored twice in that 2018 tournament, he missed the opening fixture because of a shoulder injury sustained in the Champions League final three weeks earlier, and was playing catch-up with fitness thereafter. Neither he nor his teammates were helped by preparations that sat somewhere between being disorganized and chaotic, and they lost all three of their matches.
The first signs of trouble for Salah had actually come six weeks before the tournament, when the EFA announced an agreement with Egypt Air to fly the squad around Russia. Salah’s face featured prominently on the plane’s fuselage beside branding from the team’s sponsor – a telecommunications company that rivaled the player’s own sponsor. Salah’s contract had been compromised, and he described the move as a “major insult” on social media.
Ramy Abbas, Salah’s lawyer, reminded the EFA it did not have the right to use his client’s branding without written consent from his image-rights company registered in the Cayman Islands. Salah would receive a wave of online support and the Egyptian government ended up telling the EFA to meet his requests. Khaled Abdel-Aziz, the minister of youth and sports, said live on television that the EFA was to blame for the dispute, claiming the organization might not have the expertise or experience to deal with the commercial aspects of an emerging global superstar.
It was the first time Salah’s power and sense of otherness had played out in public and while younger sections of the Egyptian population were behind him, those with longer memories asked why money should be at the center of any discussion ahead of the most important sporting event for Egypt in generations.
There were suggestions that national president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi had been behind the order to resolve the feud. Perhaps el-Sisi realized he needed to keep Salah onside: Egypt’s stay in the city of Grozny, their base for the 2018 World Cup, had an added significance, with the Chechen Republic’s Muslim leader, Ramzan Kadyrov (a man accused of numerous human-rights abuses), seeing the political benefit of having Salah staying in his region’s capital.
Shortly after arriving, Salah received a call, asking him to meet an important guest in the lobby of the team hotel. It was Kadyrov himself, who insisted on escorting him to a training session at Grozny’s 30,000-capacity Akhmat Arena stadium where, amid a flurry of photographs, both figures were given standing ovations from an unusually big crowd as they walked onto the pitch.
“Mohamed Salah thanked us for our surprisingly warm and good hospitality, great affection for the team and excellent conditions for their stay and training,” Kadyrov wrote on the Russian social network, VK.
Kadyrov would later sit beside Salah at a banquet held on the player’s birthday before announcing on social media: “Mohamed Salah is an honorary citizen of the Chechen Republic!”
Salah has never spoken about his interactions with Kadyrov, but he was more open about some of the other distractions in the summer of 2018, especially after Egypt traveled to St Petersburg for its second group game against hosts Russia, with the players sitting at the back of the plane, while EFA members flew in the first-class section.
The night before this crucial fixture, hotel security staff disappeared and Salah had celebrities knocking on his door for photographs as he tried to sleep. “When you have a player, or players, who get to sleep at 6am, there is a problem,” Salah later reflected in a post on Facebook.
Another defeat followed the one to Russia, this time to Saudi Arabia, and Egypt went home with a whimper.
Salah, who complained publicly about what happened over the months that followed during other skirmishes with the EFA, was framed by some as a pampered footballer who had forgotten his roots, yet he claimed he was just trying to introduce better conditions, giving the team more of a chance of winning.
The EFA has since got things wrong at other tournaments.
At the 2023 AFCON, the team hotel, located in Abidjan’s business district, was filled with supporters from other nations, and it was difficult for players to relax. Yet since the arrival of the Hassan brothers, despite their earlier frustrations with Salah, the players’ interests have tended to come first more often than not.
Now, in remote Spokane, they are unlikely to be distracted.
For Salah, however, the pressure feels as great as ever.