The Leicester City man is North Africa’s outstanding
player today, but how does he compare with the region’s finest players
of all time?
Over the last year, Riyad Mahrez has distinguished himself among his peers, and has been rewarded with a seventh-placed finish in the 2016 Goal 50.
Recognition by Goal ’s editorial team is just the latest honour to be bestowed upon the wideman, who scored 17 goals and contributed 11 assists during Leicester City’s miraculous title triumph last season.
In a team of heroes, Mahrez stood out, and even in the Premier League—the world’s wealthiest, if not the greatest, domestic competition—he shone among his contemporaries.
The attacker became the first African player to win the PWA Players’ Player of the Year award, which, considering luminaries such as Didier Drogba, Michael Essien, Nwankwo Kanu, Yaya Toure and Jay-Jay Okocha all spent their prime years in the EPL, is a remarkable feat.
In his victory, a glass ceiling was broken, and yet the individual honours didn’t stop there, with nominations for the Ballon d'Or and the Fifa Best Player list to follow.
Mahrez stats | EPL 2015-16 Mahrez made the PFA Team of the Year, and was named the PFA Fans’ Player of the Year, again becoming the first African talent to win the award, and the first player since Robin van Persie in 2012 to claim both the PPY and the FPY simultaneously.
Having conquered England, both as part of Claudio Ranieri’s excellent collective and as an individual, the landmark occasions just keep coming for the 25-year-old, who was also the first North African player to win the Premier League.
He’s already impressing in his maiden campaign in the Champions League—scoring three in four—where Leicester’s target must now surely be at least a spot in the quarter-finals, while Mahrez will also be aiming to help Algeria to their second continental title and to the World Cup in Russia in 2018.
Individually, Mahrez’s next target will surely be the African Player of the Year award and, having been nominated for the 2016 prize, it would appear as though only Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang stands between him and continental recognition.
Should he receive the nod from Caf, Mahrez would become ninth North African player to win the award—the first since 1998—and would surely enter the conversation of the region’s greatest player of all time.
It’s no surprise that of the eight North African players to have previously won the top individual prize in the African game, seven have been attacking talents, with goalkeeper Ezzaki Badou the only exception for a region that has a long legacy of producing skilful, creative, attacking talents.
In terms of club honours, few of the previous winners can really compare with Mahrez’s Premier League title and, notably, the central role he played in the triumph.
Algeria’s Rabah Madjer (below) would argue that his European Cup final goal for FC Porto—equalising against Bayern Munich in 1987 before the Portuguese giants went onto win—was the greatest single contribution by a player from the North Africa in Europe, and it wasn’t his only achievement north of the Mediterranean.
Madjer was the top scorer in the European Cup a season later—albeit with only four goals—and won three Portuguese titles with Porto, although the time he spent in any of Europe’s traditional major five leagues was limited to 14 games with Valencia in the late 1980s.
From a broader perspective, other classic attacking talents like Tarak Dhiab, Ahmed Faras, Lakhdar Belloumi and Bibo Al-Khatib arguably suffer from never having ‘tested’ themselves in Europe, and it’s tantalising to imagine what Mohamed Aboutrika, who never won Caf’s top prize, might have achieved had he opted to leave Al-Ahly during his peak years.
While Badou, Mustapha Hadji and Mohammed Timoumi (below), who won the Player of the Year award in 1985, all ventured into the European game, none of the trio came close to the kind of success that Madjer and Mahrez enjoyed.
Neither can any of the other prominent North African players who featured in Europe for prominent spells of their career match Mahrez’s achievement during the 2015-16 season.
The likes of Aziz Bouderbala, Hany Ramzy and Ahmed Hassan may have played in top competitions and for big clubs, but they cannot compete with Mahrez’s achievement with the Foxes,
Something that sets many of the aforementioned names apart from many of the other talented players to emerge from North Africa is that they delivered career-defining performances at major international tournaments, either World Cups or Nations Cups.
Madjer scored twice as Algeria beat Nigeria 5-1 en route to their first Nations Cup title in 1990, Faras led Morocco to their only Afcon title in 1976, while Hadji’s POTY victory came on the back of his majestic showings at the 1998 World Cup in France.
The importance that performances should play in the overall evaluation of a player’s career is a debate that inevitably rears its head whenever Messi vs. Ronaldo discussions are held, and it’s pertinent when comparing Mahrez to some of the grandest names in North Africa’s past.
Indeed, despite his form over the last 18 months, Mahrez surely needs to deliver that career-defining performance at a major international tournament—particularly as part of such a star-studded Algeria selection—and to sustain last season’s form beyond the isolated ‘miracle’ of 2015-16 in order to rank among the region’s all-time greats.
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