Outside of the Ritz Carlton on 22nd Street in the heart of Washington stand scores of footy fans patiently sweating through the acrid sizzle of summertime in the District. Boys are begging to see a champion’s first steps on American soil. They are waiting for Sadio Mane: the bubbly striker from Bambali, Senegal; an essential component of Liverpool’s return to glory; and, now, newest member of Bayern Munich, winner of 32 Bundesliga championships.
In one corner a gaggle of uncles in loafers, visibly upset Mane is late, argue while puffing enough cigarette smoke to make my lungs start shadowboxing. In another, Germans ask Americans who Bayern was playing. Some white boys have been here since work ended, FaceTiming their bros about the commotion, “Oh, shit Drew!” one crows. “Bayern Munich is in town!” Others are bar hopping until the club’s bus arrives. A small crew is frantically tracking the team jet via smartphone.
Compared to American sports’ relatively structured free agency system, the European transfer window can politely be described as a clusterfuck. Clubs give up on players, players quit on teams, shadowy agents line up multi-million Euro deals without much in the way of authority. Even amidst this chaos, it was basically impossible to imagine Sadio Mane leaving Liverpool. Sometimes in the beautiful game men defy the gravity of the pitch and manage to embody the spirit of their club. Sadio did that. For him to leave such a storied club is a big enough feat by itself—you know, especially after winning the Champions League in 2019, and ending the club’s 30-year wait for a Premier League title in 2020. But to leave one megaclub and bounce to another? That’s got folks champing at the bit behind steel fences at the Ritz.
“He was a legend at Liverpool, imagine what he’s gonna do here,” Rodrigo Pardo, a 30-year-old from Bolivia who lives in town, tells me. “He’s our strongest presence. He’s our lead role, our biggest signing. I, at least, have some hope now because we’ve signed him. Without Mane: we’d have no cushion.” Maribel Rivera, a 37-year-old woman who came from New Hampshire to see Bayern, wore her feelings on her skin. She’s been a fan since 2001 and got a Bayern logo tatted on her forearm with the club motto—“Mia San Mia,” roughly translated to “We are who we are”—next to it. Bayern is her world. And Sadio has expanded it. “Yes, he will help our future,” she says. “But he will help the rest of the world as well.” Warren Hedderich, a 35-year-old from Hamburg who’s lived in D.C. for almost two decades, told me he loves that Bayern can attract superstars of this level, but that adding Mane is more meaningful. “Someone as humble and charitable as he is is always a good addition to any club,” he says. He looks around for a second, pulls his sunglasses down, and tells me something that ain’t a state secret. “And, you know, he’s a brotha, shit,” he says. “Outside of us he’s gonna be the only brotha up in here.”
It would be a lot to put on any athlete, let alone one fresh off a torrid run of form for club and country, who just turned 30 in April and is entering his 12th pro season. But I notice that when Sadio steps off the bus right before 8:00pm, his Liverpool red changed to Bayern white, he still has enough energy for adoration. Yes, fans are here for Serge Gnabry and Thomas Müller, but the yells and hollers tonight are not for heroes of old. No, they are for a boy from Bambali who never dreamed his life could blossom into something worth singing about.
The uncles drop their cigs when Sadio’s smile splashes down on the small street. Sadio gallantly moves toward them, posing for every picture and stuntin’ in each selfie.
When Sadio finds me downstairs in the basement of the Ritz, the joy hasn’t left his face, even if he hasn’t eaten since he touched down in the States a few hours ago. He went from training in Germany straight to the plane, only to be stuck on the runway with no snacks to chew on. I haven’t eaten either, so he offers to share a meal with me of spearmint gum and sugar water. Who am I to decline a legend’s invitation?
He sits down and readies his game face before he crosses his legs. To break the ice, I joke with him about how I (and no sane person) is a Liverpool fan. Sadio lets out a sigh colored with both relief and, almost, regret.
“I’m not on Liverpool anymore, bro.”
Well, whose choice was that? All he lobs back to me is a knowing smile. Okay, then, Sadio Mane, riddle me this: why does a Liverpool legend, a man beloved far and wide for his unique speed and skill on the wing, for bringing a cup to Senegal, decide after six years to end the longest football relationship he’s ever known, breaking up with one Red Devil for another red-and-white heartthrob?
His answer is succinct.
“It’s simple: I want to win every trophy possible. All the trophies with Bayern Munich: cup, league, champions league, everything.” I tell him that his answer could come off a bit evasive. But it won’t be the first time he pops back that this is the truth. Liverpool was basically the only place he truly wanted to play. “Every single day when I went to Liverpool’s training ground, I always tried to think about that, to take the pressure off and smile,” he says. He’d think to himself, I have plenty of reasons to be happy. I’m doing the job I love, the best job in the world, the chance to play. You just have to always be happy and give the same joy to the people.
Like it or love it, he’s at Bayern now, mowing through competition on one of the quickest sides modern German soccer has ever seen. And, frankly, he’s not gonna keep explaining why for too much longer. He won’t apologize for his bliss. Every day, he smiles as if he is dancing on the sun, his feet never feeling the burn.
“I sacrifice everything for football. It is something that I love,” he says. “I came from somewhere very far away. And if I have this opportunity to play…” He comes in closer, his voice trembling with affect. “I just thank God.”
Sadio wants to tell me a story.
He says it will help me understand how he’s wound up here, at 30—graying, but nowhere near cracking—on a new team, taking on a new challenge despite not having much left to prove. When he was a boy in Bambali, a small, rural village in Senegal on the dancing banks of the Casamance River, he says football was the only thing that kept him smiling. The first time he watched Ronaldinho play, he was convinced: he got a black pen and wrote his favorite player’s name and number on all of the white shirts he owned. He would tell anyone who would listen that, one day, Sadio would be a star.
He didn’t dream of doing anything different. “Football is my life,” he tells me. Those players, their feats helped him dream. “They were my heroes. Because of them, I was inspired.”
But inspiration wouldn’t convince a family who didn’t want him to play football. Sadio’s father, a local Imam, was convinced it wasn’t in his best interest. His mother also wasn’t budging.
“They told me I was wasting my time,” he says. “They didn’t want to see me become a football player because so many people waste their time to play football and at the end of the day they don’t become successful. So, my parents were quite against this ting. My dad, my mom, nobody wanted me to play. They were categorically against football, especially my mom. They said the best thing was for me to go to school and to study and become something else that’s not futbol.”
There was only one problem with that.
“Since I’ve been born,” Sadio says, “Football is all I’ve ever loved.”
It was hard to keep Sadio away from the game. His father died when Sadio was seven years old, and soon after the rumors began spreading about his unique talent around parts of Senegal. People shuffled into his village, population 2,000 tops, to watch Sadio dash past defenders in the dirt. “You know, I was very, very famous,” he says, with a thin humility. “People came from four hundred and five hundred kilometers away because they heard about me and wanted to watch me play football.”
He spent his childhood this way, sneaking off in the afternoons, after school, to charm his fans while hiding his skills from his family, whom nosy neighbors informed anyway.“They used to beat me all the time,” he says, giggling about what his family did to him when they found out what he was doing. Eventually he came to a crossroads: if he was serious about a life in football, he’d need to move to Dakar, the capital. His best friends lent him money for a bus and kept his secret. His family found out anyway, and pulled him from Dakar back to the village.
Sadio made a final stand, the one that propelled him to where he is now. He told his mother he’d come back and finish his last year in school, but wouldn’t—couldn’t—promise more. “After this, if you guys don’t support me I’m finished. I will go and not come back,” he says, wiping his hands for effect. Sadio went back to Dakar, starred at the touted Génération Foot academy and, sure enough, he earned a contract with FC Metz, a team in France’s second division Ligue 2. After just 19 appearances, other clubs were calling Metz to offer double what they’d paid for his services.
So busy realizing his dream, the teenager never phoned home to tell mom that her son would be flying to France on the first thing cookin’. He only told his uncle. Mom still thought he was at the academy. It took a bit. He needed money to buy credits for his phone. But, eventually, Satou heard from her son. The first thing he told her was to turn on the TV to watch him play. So confused on the other line, Sadio said, she didn’t even think it was him.
“I’ve always told my mom, ‘I don’t know how I’m gonna do it, but I’m gonna be successful because it’s the only job I can do where I will be happy in the future,’” Sadio explains. “When I was saying these kinds of things, she laughed. She think I’m crazy. But the question came to my mind all the time: ‘How?’ Because my parent wasn’t rich enough to help me or buy soccer boots, or bring me somewhere where I could practice football.”
“But,” he says, sharply raising a finger into the air. “I would never give up. I always follow my dreams until I find success.”
The first time I saw Sadio play was in 2013. He was a fledgling forward for Red Bull Salzburg taking on, of all teams, Bayern Munich, the giant of German football.
Sadio was a boy the first time he stepped onto the pitch in Germany: spry, hair thinning, but a dark chocolate thunderbolt of Senegalese flair. Germany made him into a man, taught him football and, in some ways, planted the seeds for his electric growth.
The scene was breathtaking: there was Sadio flying around the wing and zipping through the midfield past one of the most technically savvy teams in the world. He was a West African wunderkind, flashing past defenses with so much ease and grace that for a moment, I blinked, and thought I saw Misty Copeland pirouetting around the pitch. Cameras conveniently closed in on skipper Pep Guardiola’s face to document the shock and awe in real time. Pep, now managing Manchester City, is widely considered a genius tactician. And on that day, he was outwitted.
I can confess, with plenty of ease, that I don’t know as much as Pep does when it comes to football. But I do know a lot about pride, about the stories of Black boys just trying to make it in a world so cruel it stamps out their softness before they can truly blossom into something beautiful. And on that pitch, I saw someone trying, desperately, to insist their existence, to boom loudly, and proudly, that no one, anywhere, ever again would confine the spark coming from Sadio boots. “Playing against Bayern, at that time,” Sadio says, smiling, “was like playing in the final of the Champions League. I really, really focused on my part in the game. I think I prepared more than them. I knew them but they didn’t know me, I think that was their mistake.” He scored early in the game, and later dished out an assist so beautiful Pep was left with his mouth wide open. “This game changed everything,” he says.
Sadio once said when he was younger that playing against German sides was the thing that gave him his sweetest football education. Well, playing Bayern gave him that and a money phone. “After this game, I got contacted by many teams: West Ham, Southampton and, even, Bayern.”
Why didn’t you go to Bayern?
“I was really, really young and those players—like [Arjen] Robben—were in their prime, so I made my way [elsewhere] until today became a reality.” Sadio even stopped going to practice at Salzburg, hoping to force his way from the club, and sat out their most important game, a chance to qualify for the Champions League.
He’d stay in Europe, heading to Southampton in the English Premier League. He quickly became their top scorer, the best thing on grass at the club. In his first season at Southampton, he missed two games to represent Senegal in the Africa Cup of Nations tournament. One was against Liverpool, his dream club. “For me to not play against Liverpool was [hard], because I had played against all the big teams at that point.” In his first game against the Reds he was sent off with a red card. “Oh! They were so lucky.”
The next year, he showed up late for the Liverpool match, and started the game on the bench. He subbed on in the second half, his team down 2-0. He almost sings his words remembering the comeback. “I scored, and scored and scored,” he says. He is adamant: “That was the day Liverpool bought me.”
Sadio says Jurgen Klopp, Liverpool’s manager, had tried to sign him once before, when Sadio was at Salzburg and Klopp was at Borussia Dortmund, in Germany. They met; he even toured Dortmund's facilities. But it never came to be.
“He wanted me, but it did not work out,” he says. “I went to Southampton, he went to Liverpool, and at the end of the season I was supposed to go to Manchester United. I spoke with [then-manager Louis] Van Gaal and told him to give me some time to think about it. It was very hard to buy me at the time, but they made an offer. But the same night, I got call from Klopp. When he call me, I say, ‘Manchester want me, but I don’t go to Manchester, I come to Liverpool.’ He was very happy.” And he told Klopp he never had to apologize again. “It is my dream to play for Liverpool!”
Leaving Liverpool is still a sore spot for him. His eyes mist when he talks about it now. It is understandable, of course: Sadio was a boy of prophecy for the scouses, winning everything in sight over six seasons and taking Liverpool from mid-table mediocrity to the crown of the Premier League. Barely a month removed from leaving the only place he’s tasted glory, Sadio is almost mournful.
“If you see my story, especially where I came from to become the player I am, to play for Liverpool it’s even more special,” he says. He stares at me, pensive about his next words. “Even before they bought me, for 30 years, they never win the league. And I came there, I win with the team and we won all the trophies. I am very proud to be part of the club’s story.” He begins to sniffle. “You can just be proud of yourself,” he says, almost telling himself it’s okay. “Yeah,” he nods.
Liverpool fans have been grateful for his time there, rather than begrudge his departure.
Sadio still keeps a home in Liverpool, so he can always have a reason to come back to England and support his old club. But his tenure was never entirely without controversy.
Like, say, Klopp’s habit of subbing Sadio off in crucial moments. He didn’t bother to hide his frustration, often stomping off the pitch. His face still wriggles as he talks about it. “The only thing you can do to ever hurt me is to stop me from playing football,” he says. “It hurts me. If I’m having a bad game on the pitch, well, I’m still angry because I still think I can do something until the last minute.”
Hearing this, it’s hard not to think of Sadio’s relationship with his fellow Liverpool attacker Mo Salah, who didn’t seem to wind up being substituted quite as often. Sadio tells me that he left Liverpool on good terms with his teammate Salah, despite what tabloids and fans say about the duo. “People say we have issues. All the time, that they are major. But me and Salah, we are always next to each other in the dressing room. We always talk, we try to help each other. But, sometimes, you know?” Sadio merely shrugs. “Me and him. You know, if I had a frustration with [Virgil] van Dijk, or someone, no one would talk. But if I have with Salah? It is something. Boom. But it is part of football. We have a good relationship and we respect each other, so we move on. If [frustrations] happen, it’s over quickly. We are teammates, his success is my success.”
The thing about winning it all at a storied club, though, is that once it’s done, you need to find a new challenge. Honestly, what do you do once you’ve conquered all of your dreams? If you are Sadio Mane, you dream up new ones.
Toward the end of our conversation, I hear Sadio’s stomach gurgle something almighty. It’s time to go.
Before he steps away, he leaves me with a final story, one that crystalizes what the game has given him, and what he’s given back. After leaving Liverpool this summer, Sadio returned home to Bambali. In the years since he has become an international superstar, he has sent money back to Senegal to help revive the land. There are new schools, stadiums, clothes, shoes, and food for those in poverty: a degree of generosity I haven’t seen elsewhere. “I used to be in their position,” Sadio says.
That day in Bambali, he was driving through the streets. It was the afternoon, so hot that the ground was baking. Sadio looked from his window and saw boys dribbling through the village.
“I stopped my car and I just waited and watched. I heard one of the boys call another, ‘Sadio, Sadio!’ His voice cracks. “All of these things, they mean a lot,” he says. “They make me emotional. It makes me proud of myself. I take it as extra motivation to push myself until the limit.” His words slide to sanctification. “This is more than football,” he says. “The joy you give to those young ones playing. They want to be like you. You should always be a good example for them, show them the good things, and be a role model for them.” It reminds me of a line from one of Senegalese socialist Léopold Sédar Senghor’s poems: “Our new nobility is not to dominate our people, but to be their rhythm and their heart.”
The scene emphasized the importance of his biggest accomplishment: winning the African Cup of Nations for the first time last summer. “We have had so many disappointments with our national football team in Senegal. When I won this cup, it was the best day of my life. It will remain the best day of my life. I don’t think I can do something more special for me than what I did winning AfCon. It’s my country. It means everything to me.” One last tear for the road. “I would be even ready to die for my country. That’s the truth,” he says. “After winning all the trophies I had, without winning Africa Cup, I stopped my career. I lived with regret. That regret was going to stay with me until my last day, for sure. So you can imagine, after winning it, how relieved I was. I never wanted to win anything more.” He jabs a finger into his chest. “It will forever stay in my heart,” he says. “I will never again have any regret in my life.”
He stands up, shakes my hand, and hurries away for some grub.
Eventually, I make like Sadio and hurry over to Bukom, a Senegalese restaurant in Adams Morgan, before I pass out.
Bukom is home for transplants yearning for a taste of home. Owners Kojo and Joe have been in DC since 1992, cooking their father’s recipes and watching Premier League football on small TVs nestled into nooks around the place. As I dig into heaven cooked into cassava leaf, Joe explains that Sadio feels like family. A man with enough shine to light up Washington on a Wednesday night.
Shit, actually, that’s too light. Kojo takes it one final step further.
“When he was at Liverpool, that’s when the game was truly beautiful,” Kojo tells me. “There was no one like Sadio. That nigga is a star.”