It’s 20 minutes into Bayern Munich’s penultimate Bundesliga game before the World Cup break, a 6–1 win over Werder Bremen, and Sadio Mané goes down under a challenge. When he sits up, it’s clear something is wrong. His face is blank, but he must know what this may mean. He is forced off. There’s a hope it’s largely precautionary, but the news soon breaks: It’s an injury to his right knee, and his World Cup is in doubt.
Macky Sall, Senegal’s president, tweeted his recovery wish. Aliou Cissé, Senegal’s manager and captain of its most successful World Cup team—the team, with Mané as the driving force, Senegal was hoping to match or even surpass in Qatar—could hardly come to grips with what he must have known at the time was an inevitability.
“Losing Sadio Mané is not something small for Senegal and African football,” he said upon revealing Senegal’s World Cup squad. “I cannot speak of his absence even if in my head I have to take this into account.”
Mané was named to Senegal’s World Cup squad anyway, as there were distant hopes he might make the third group game, but those hopes didn’t last long. Thursday it was confirmed that he had surgery to reattach a tendon to the head of his right fibula, promptly ruling him out of the World Cup. For Senegal, and for its man of the moment, it is a desperately harsh blow.
A look back to last winter—and a look back to Mané’s origin story—provides all the evidence why. Mané spoke to shortly before he suffered his injury, and while events have changed things significantly, his thoughts and his words still offer insight into what football means for him—and what he means for Senegal.
