Football season’s here: these are the some of the biggest Muslim players you need to know
From Fofana to Salah and El Ghazi, elite players practising Islam are having a growing impact on the sport
The summer is drawing to a close but for football fans, that’s no bad thing. It means the European top leagues are resuming, as the first competitive matches of the season kicked off last weekend. And some of the brightest stars to watch are Muslim.
The European football industry, which generated £28bn in revenue last year, is working to catch up. The Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) in England has actually been running Muslim player considerations awareness workshops for more than 10 years. When Liverpool won the Premier League in April with a 5-1 victory over Tottenham Hotspur, their then striker Darwin Nunez poured a bottle of champagne over Mohamed Salah. Many looked at Salah recoiling and wondered how football’s most high-profile Muslim player felt about this. It was subsequently confirmed that the champagne was 0% alcohol.
In the UK, five of the last 10 PFA Player of the Year awards have been won by Muslim players.
Here are some of the established and rising stars to keep your eye on this season.
Wesley Fofana (Chelsea, central defender)
Wesley Fofana, 24, was born to an Ivorian father and French mother and raised Muslim alongside his five siblings in the Marseilles suburb of Vitrolles by his mum and grandmother.
On 26 April 2021, Leicester City — Fofana’s team at the time — played Crystal Palace during Ramadan. When the sun set 30 minutes after kickoff, Crystal Palace’s goalkeeper Vicente Guaita paused before a goal kick, allowing the Muslim players Fofana and Cheikhou Kouyaté to take energy gels. It was the first time a Premier League game was paused to allow fasting players to break for Iftar.
Fofana later spoke about the significance of this moment for him: “It moved me because they thought about me.” He went on to add that the precedent had ignited debate in his native France, where sports organisations have been criticised for a growing number of discriminatory restrictions targeting Muslim athletes. “It’s about them and their faith. They’re not bothering anyone,” Fofana argued.
In 2022, he was signed by Chelsea for £70m, underlining his talent, but for the last two seasons his performance has been hampered by injuries.
Edin Džeko (Fiorentina, striker)
Bosnian striker Edin Džeko, 39, was six when the Yugoslav war started. He grew up in Sarajevo surrounded by it. His mother hated him going outside to play football but saw the joy it brought him and let him go. One night she said he couldn’t go to play and that night a shell exploded where he would have been playing.
“As a little kid, you don’t really understand the danger,” he wrote in a personal essay titled You Are Not Dead. However, he told the Mail in 2011: “When the war was over, I at least felt stronger mentally. There was not much that could intimidate or frighten me after that.”
Džeko, who speaks five languages, was born a Muslim and has been captain of his national side through moments of joy like World Cup qualification and disappointment and friction. In a country ethnically divided, getting Bosnia Serbs or Bosnia Croats to support the national team was tricky. Džeko’s leadership helped heal some of those divisions.
“There is no overstating the importance of Edin Džeko in the iconography of scattered, shattered Bosnia,” the journalist Ed Vulliamy wrote after the player led Bosnia to World Cup qualification for the first time in 2014.
He has enjoyed a long and glittering career in European football, playing in the top leagues in the Czech Republic, Germany, England and Italy. He was part of the Manchester City side that won the club’s first Premier League title in 2012 and he has led Bosnia with courage and class. This season, after a spell playing in Turkey, he has returned to Italy with Fiorentina.
Antonio Rüdiger (Real Madrid, central defender)
Antonio Rüdiger, 32, was born in Berlin where his parents sought refuge from the war in Sierra Leone. He was raised a Muslim in the city’s Neukölln district and excelled at sport as a child. His professional football career began at Stuttgart when he was 17 and played for Roma and Chelsea before joining Real Madrid in 2022.
His biography paints a blessed life, but he has described a different experience. In a piece for The Players’ Tribune in 2021, he gave an account of the worst racism he experienced as a player, which was during his time at Roma.
“They were calling me a n*****. They were shouting, ‘F*** you, go eat a banana. Every time I touched the ball, they would make monkey noises. It was not just a few people. It was a big section of the Lazio fans during the 2017 Derby della Capitale.”
Operating as a practising Muslim in a high profile sport has continued to present difficulties. In March 2024, he posted a picture on Instagram to mark Ramadan: a picture of him in a white robe kneeling on a prayer mat, with his right index finger pointing upwards. Underneath he wrote: “Ramadan Mubarak to all Muslims around the world. May the almighty accept our fasting and prayers.”
Former Bild editor in chief Julian Reichelt responded on X, accusing Rüdiger of “Islamism” and of making the “ISIS-greeting of Islamists”.
The German Football Association took legal action against Reichelt, accusing him of hate speech. Rüdiger’s management also made a complaint for “insult and slander”.
Rüdiger subsequently released a statement: “In recent days the photo has been used by individuals to make unfounded accusations. The gesture I used is called tawhid fingering. In Islam, this is considered a symbol of the unity and oneness of God… As a devout Muslim, I practice my faith, but I firmly distance myself from any kind of extremism and accusations of Islamism. Violence and terrorism are absolutely unacceptable. I stand for peace and tolerance.”
Anwar El Ghazi (currently without a club, winger)
In July 2024, a German court ruled that 30-year-old Anwar El Ghazi’s contract with his former club Mainz had been wrongfully terminated. In October 2023, El Ghazi had posted on Instagram accusing Israel’s soldiers of genocide in Gaza. The last line of his post read: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” He subsequently deleted it.
Until this point, El Ghazi had enjoyed a successful if unspectacular career as a skilful winger. Born in the Netherlands, El Ghazi began his career at Ajax, before moving to Lille and then Aston Villa. He was loved by fans of Aston Villa during his years at the club for his relentless energy and skill. He scored a crucial goal in the Championship play-off which earned them promotion to the Premier League in 2019.
After his controversial instagram post, Mainz initially suspended El Ghazi with the explanation that while there were different perspectives on the Middle East, his post was “intolerable” and “not compatible with the values of the club”.
The club then issued a detailed statement claiming that El Ghazi “regrets publishing the post and was remorseful about its negative impact”. The player disputed this and was subsequently dismissed. El Ghazi was said to be owed approximately £1.4m in outstanding salary.
Nujum Sports, an organisation for Muslim sportspeople, released a statement: “We hope clubs and professional bodies take note and do not continue to repress legitimate freedom of speech by pressurising athletes to remain silent or adopt a particular narrative with the threat of terminating contracts.”
In August 2024 El Ghazi said he had received the outstanding salary and confirmed that he would be contributing €500,000 to fund projects for children in Gaza. He spent the 2024/25 season playing for Cardiff City but was released this summer. He is reportedly likely to join Valencia in Spain in the coming days.
Mo Salah (Liverpool, forward)
At 33, Salah is arguably the most famous Muslim footballer in the world. Born and raised in Egypt, his influence on culture in Britain and beyond has been staggering. In 2019, a Nottingham Forest fan, Ben Bird, told the Guardian how Salah had inspired him to convert to Islam. “I had a hatred of Muslims,” he said.
Earlier this year, before Salah agreed a two-year contract extension reported to be £350,000 per week to stay with Liverpool, he was rumoured to have received an offer to move to Saudi Arabia worth half a billion pounds.
In 2024, Saudi Arabia was awarded the 2034 Men’s World Cup — boxing, Formula One and golf are also gravitated towards the wealthy Gulf state. Earlier this year, Piers Morgan asked the Saudi sports minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Turki al-Faisal if Mo Salah was “the big prize” in their mission to dominate the sporting world. “Definitely,” the minister replied. “He ticks all the right boxes, even for us, we’d love to have him.” He added: “We feel like we are one with the Egyptians, from our culture and our history and so on.”
Many believe that while Salah has chosen to remain in Europe for another season or two, his “homecoming” has only been delayed. As fan and convert Bird put it: “One of the Egyptians I talked to told me that Salah encompasses what being a Muslim is, following Islam correctly. He believed that Salah is making people love Muslims again.”
On 9 August, responding to an X post from Uefa about the death of the “Palestinian Pelé”, Suleiman al-Obeid, Salah asked: “Can you tell us how he died, where and why?” Within three days his post had been viewed more than 110 million times.
Salah’s illustrious football career may be entering its final phase but as a cultural figure, he retains huge influence.
