Riyad Mahrez once had a trial at Scottish club St Mirren cut short simply because of the cold weather, a small, almost forgettable detail that says everything about how unremarkable his path into professional football looked at the time. Scouts regularly passed on him for being too slender to survive men’s football. He ended up winning the Premier League with Leicester City, the Champions League with Manchester City, and CAF’s African Footballer of the Year award, closing his international career as Algeria’s captain.
Early Rejections And A Slow Start
Born on 21 February 1991 in Clichy, France, to an Algerian father and Moroccan mother, Mahrez joined the AAS Sarcelles youth academy in 2004 and spent years being overlooked by bigger clubs unconvinced by his build. The St Mirren trial that ended over cold weather sits alongside plenty of other quiet rejections from that period, the kind every young footballer collects before anyone takes them seriously.
He turned professional with Quimper in Ligue 2’s lower reaches in 2009, making 27 appearances before signing for Le Havre in 2010. Even there, his path was not straightforward. Mahrez started in Le Havre’s reserve side before graduating to the first team, where he went on to make 60 appearances and score 6 goals in Ligue 2 across four seasons.
Read More: Who Are the Desert Foxes? Algeria’s National Football Team Explained covers the national side Mahrez would go on to captain.
The Leicester City Miracle
Leicester City signed Mahrez on 11 January 2014 for a fee of around £450,000, a genuinely modest outlay that looks almost absurd in hindsight given what followed. He spent his first eighteen months adjusting to English football before the 2015-16 season turned him into one of the most talked about players anywhere in Europe.
That season, Mahrez scored 17 league goals in 37 appearances as Leicester won the Premier League title against odds so long that bookmakers had priced the club at 5,000 to 1 before the season began. His performances earned him the PFA Players’ Player of the Year award, making him the first African player ever to win it, alongside a place in the PFA Team of the Year.
African Footballer Of The Year
Mahrez’s form carried straight through into 2016, when CAF named him African Footballer of the Year, the continent’s most prestigious individual honour. Winning it off the back of a genuine Premier League title, rather than a strong domestic season in Africa alone, gave the award particular weight that year and confirmed Mahrez as Algeria’s biggest football export of his generation.
Read More: The Greatest Algerian Footballers of All Time places that achievement alongside the rest of Algeria’s football history.
Manchester City And A Continental Treble
Manchester City signed Mahrez from Leicester on 10 July 2018 for a fee of around £60 million, making him the most expensive African player in football history at the time. He spent five seasons at the club, adding Premier League titles and domestic cups to his collection before City completed a continental treble in 2022-23, lifting the Champions League alongside the league and FA Cup, even though Mahrez himself did not feature in that season’s final.
By the time he left City for Saudi Pro League club Al-Ahli, Mahrez had built one of the most complete trophy cabinets of any African player in the modern game, spanning two different Premier League champions and a Champions League winner’s medal.
An International Career That Started By Accident
Mahrez earned his first Algeria cap in 2014, called up just weeks before that summer’s World Cup in Brazil for a friendly against Armenia, and immediately made his case with two assists in a 3-1 win. That performance was enough to secure his place in the squad for Brazil, and he scored his first international goal later that year against Malawi in an AFCON qualifier.
Just over a decade later, on 21 March 2025, Mahrez became only the seventh Algerian player in the country’s history to reach 100 caps, a milestone that captured how completely he had gone from a surprise late call-up to the defining player of his national team generation.
A Captain’s Farewell At The 2026 World Cup
Mahrez captained Algeria into the 2026 World Cup, scoring twice in a 3-3 draw with Austria during the group stage after Algeria had opened the tournament with a heavy 3-0 loss to Argentina and a 2-1 win over Jordan. Algeria finished third in their group before losing 2-0 to Switzerland in the Round of 32 on 2 July 2026, a result that ended the country’s tournament.
Read More: Algeria at AFCON: Two Titles and a Golden Generation covers the earlier tournament where Mahrez delivered his most famous moment for the national team, a stoppage-time free kick winner against Nigeria in the 2019 semi-final.
Shortly after that Switzerland defeat, Mahrez announced his retirement from international football, closing out a national team career built on 120 caps and 40 goals, numbers that place him among Algeria’s most productive and decorated players ever to wear the shirt.
For upcoming Algeria fixtures now that the Mahrez era has closed, the AFCON hub on TuSportNews and its linked AI Predictions page track the national team as it moves into its next chapter, alongside the broader AI Predictions hub for match forecasts across every league the site currently follows.
A Career That Rewrote What Was Possible
Few players anywhere in world football have travelled as far from their starting point as Mahrez did, from a rejected trial in the Scottish cold to lifting the Champions League with Manchester City. His retirement from international duty closes one of the more improbable careers in modern football, but the trophy cabinet, the African Footballer of the Year award, and the memory of that free kick against Nigeria in 2019 are not going anywhere. For a generation of young Algerian and North African players, Mahrez’s path from Le Havre’s reserve team to the very top of the European game is proof of exactly how far genuine ability can carry a player who kept going after being overlooked.