Not good enough for Marseille, now ‘priceless’ at Leicester: The rise of Riyad Mahrez

Ian Hawkey charts the rise and rise of Algeria forward Riyad Mahrez, the star player of Leicester City's remarkable Premier League season.

Riyad Mahrez, left, has scored 13 Premier League goals and created seven assists for Leicester this season. Carl Recine / Reuters

It was barely 24 hours before the opening of the winter transfer window.

Marseille, still the best supported club in France by their own estimation, were thinking about their strategy.

At consideration was good-value signings who might give them the extra push needed for what was a genuine tilt at the Ligue 1 title at that stage.

That was almost exactly a year ago. One of the players under discussion within Marseille was the Algeria international winger, Riyad Mahrez, then 23.

He had made a good impression with Leicester City, who he had joined a year earlier in time to help them to promotion to the Premier League.

Although his name prompted only a faint recognition in France where he had grown up, his name was put before Marseille with enthusiastic recommendations.

None apparently, sounded strong enough for the Marseille president Vincent Labrune.

“Do you really think a player from Leicester could have a place at Marseille with the project we are currently involved in?” Labrune emailed an associate, a line of correspondence that came into the hands of the magazine France Football earlier this month.

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“Don’t take this message the wrong way,” added Labrune, “but I don’t really like being thought gullible.”

Twelve months on, and hindsight casts Labrune’s instincts and his indignation in a particularly harsh light.

Granted, his Marseille were top of the Ligue 1 table last December when he snootily looked down on Leicester City, who were then facing a long, arduous struggle against relegation from the Premier League.

Today, Marseille sit mid-table in France while Leicester just displaced from the top perch by Arsenal in England.

Mahrez has emerged as a figurehead of their upstart courage, confidence and attractiveness as a team.

He ended his marvellous 2015 with a brilliant piece of skill last Tuesday night; a dexterous turn to bewilder the Manchester City player Kevin de Bruyne, a manoeuvre evoking the so-called ‘Cruyff turn’, a pirouette named after one of the game’s greats.

Leicester’s 0-0 draw with City represented another endorsement of their legitimacy at the summit of English football. It also showcased the repertoire of Mahrez, eager to take on the costliest and the toughest of opponents, creator of some of the best scoring opportunities of the night.

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Mahrez has contributed to more than half of Leicester’s 37 goals in the league so far. His 13 goals make him the division’s third-highest scorer. He would be further up that ladder had his colleague Jamie Vardy not benefited so much from Mahrez’s passes for the striker’s 15 goals. The winger has seven assists.

Suffice to say, this month’s transfer window would regard him far more highly than Marseille’s boss did in the last, although encouragingly for Leicester, he told Canal+: “It would be stupid for me to move away, with Leicester where we are now.”

The midlands club bought him for less than half a million euros in January 2014.

The sellers were Le Havre, of Ligue 2. He had never played top-flight football in France and had, in his teens and early 20s, been overlooked by scouts from major clubs partly, he says, because they thought him too physically frail.

Le Havre saw a toughness in him despite of his spindly frame, but a need to adapt his game. As he said of himself: “I play as if I am still on the streets.”

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Those formative streets were in Sarcelles, a suburb to the north of Paris, where he was born, the son of an Algerian father and a Moroccan mother.

He qualifies to play for three countries, but chose Algeria, where he regularly holidayed and was called up by the Desert Foxes for the 2014 World Cup.

He was part of an impressive side who lost narrowly at the last 16 stage to eventual winners Germany. At the time, he had yet to play in either the Premier League or Ligue 1.

Six months later, the fact that he had sparkled from time to time in a team struggling with the demands of England’s leading league not enough of audition to convince Marseille.

Now, he is not within reach, not by a distance. “He is priceless,” said Leicester head coach Claudio Ranieri.

“He is improving all the time here, so why would he want to go anywhere else?”

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