Sadio Mané could have bought himself 10 Ferraris. He could have filled his arms with diamond watches. But when he was asked about his luxuries, the Senegalese forward answered something no one expected to hear from a millionaire football star.
“I went hungry, played barefoot and did not go to school”, he said in 2019, when he was shining at Liverpool. And he added the phrase that went around the world: with what he earns thanks to football, he prefers to help his people rather than accumulate cars and planes.
He did not stop at words. In Bambali, his hometown in Senegal, he built schools with his own money and provided direct financial aid to families living in extreme poverty. In 2022, that work earned him the first Ballon d’Or Socrates Award. Mané never forgot the boy who dreamed of a football, and today he is the help he never had.
