On the day before the summer transfer-window of 2013 came to a close Victor Moses, Tiago Ilori and Mamadou Sakho were all picked out by the television cameras attending Liverpool’s home Premier League match against defending champions Manchester United at Anfield. Within hours of that match finishing the club was able to confirm that all three had signed contracts to join a squad that had already been considerably strengthened during the summer months. Victor Moses was certainly the most well-known of the trio to British fans because he had already played in England for several years. But Mamadou Sakho, ten months older than Moses and three years older than Ilori, was arguably the more experienced because he had spent several years with one club in France before furthering his career by moving to England. Sakho had also been playing in European competitions regularly since early-2007, whereas that was a relatively new innovation for both Moses and Ilori. Sakho was born in Paris and did not have to move away from the French capital to kick-start his career as a professional footballer. He was associated with Paris F.C. from a very young age before moving on to Paris Saint-Germain at the age of twelve. He excelled as a teenager before being brought regularly into the club’s first-team squad by experienced manager Paul Le Guen after the Frenchman returned to manage in his homeland following a largely unsatisfactory year with Glasgow Rangers. Le Guen gave 17-year-old Sakho his senior League debut … and the captaincy … against Valenciennes towards the end of October 2007; and he remains the youngest-ever captain of a Ligue 1 club. He made eleven more League appearances in 2007/08 and then played in nearly 80% of PSG’s Ligue 1 fixtures over the next three seasons, a period during which he collected a winners’ medal in the Coupe de France (2010) two years after he had been a member of the team that had won the Coupe de la Ligue. Further glory would come in 2013 when Paris Saint-Germain won its first domestic championship since 1994 a year after finishing runners-up to Montpellier. When PSG also won the Trophée des Champions (the equivalent of the English Community Shield) early in August 2013, it meant that Sakho at the early age of twenty-three had won all the major domestic prizes that it was possible to win in France. The defender played at several different levels for his country before being called up by national team manager Laurent Blanc for a friendly against Norway in August 2010. Although he did not play in that match, which was Blanc’s first in charge of team affairs, he only had to wait another three months before coming on as a half-time substitute for France against England at Wembley, a fixture the visitors won by two goals to one. At the time of his move to Liverpool Sakho had appeared thirteen times for the French national team.
Posted on: Wed, 04 Sep 2013 02:36:52 +0000
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