Mohamed Salah on AFCON 2025: “This has been my favourite national team camp ever”
Egypt’s progress has been collective as much as individual. Scenes from the dressing room after their quarter-final, with players singing, dancing and savouring a hard-earned victory, showed a squad united by a common purpose.
“This has been my favourite camp ever,” Salah said at the post-match press conference, where he beamed with a broad smile while cracking jokes with journalists.
“The players are all close, the comedy is non-stop. We’re fighting for each other to win the title.”
The unity is telling. At full time in Agadir, Egypt’s players gathered around Salah for a group hug. The atmosphere suggests an almost Messi‑Argentina 2022 World Cup vibe, with the squad rallying around their captain in pursuit of a long‑elusive title.
This was Egypt’s sixth successive quarter-final victory at AFCON, and they have reached the final on each of the past five occasions. Experience, once again, is proving decisive.
But Salah knows the job only gets harder from here on, with Senegal to come in the semi-finals on Wednesday (14 January), in what is a repeat of the 2022 final, which Salah’s former team-mate Sadio Mane, and his Teranga Lions won on penalties.
“Senegal are tough opponents but we’ll give it our best,” said Salah. “We fight so hard and you can see nobody is holding the team back. I see that from the players and the manager as well. We just have to carry on, give it our best and we’ll see.”
Egypt have relied more on efficiency than dominance to win games at this AFCON. At an average age of 28.9 years (per Transfermarkt), Egypt have the second-oldest squad at the tournament. And the Pharaohs couldn’t have picked a better man to get the best out of older heads than Head Coach Hossam Hassan, who captained Egypt to AFCON victory in 2006 at age 40.
In the game against the Ivorians, Egypt only had 29 per cent of the possession, but the record seven-time champions were ruthless when the chances came. Four of their eight efforts were on target, and they scored with three of them.
In tournaments like this, control does not always belong to those who keep the ball longest.
Increasingly, it belongs to those who know exactly what to do with it, and for Salah and Egypt, so far, the script has played out exactly how they would have imagined it.
