Senegalese player Sadio Mane won the first Socrates Award in the 2022 Ballon d’Or award for his contribution off the field. Mane, a Bayern Munich player, has worked actively to build hospitals and schools in his home country Senegal.  

The Socrates award has been introduced during the 2022 Ballon d’Or. Socrates’s brother Rai unveiled the award at the ceremony today. 

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Watch Mane receiving the award here.

Sadio Mane is considered a hero in Senegal for his contribution to the Senegalese people. There was no school in his village when he was growing up and he started off his charity work by building a school.

He also built a hospital which reportedly cost him 530,000 Euros. 

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A devout Muslim, Mane started his career in the top-tier league playing for the Austrian club Red Bull Salzburg. He moved to the Premier League in 2014 joining Southampton which was then managed by the former PSG manager Mauricio Pochettino. 

Jurgen Klopp, the Liverpool manager, was aware of his capability having seen Mane play in the Bundesliga while he was managing Borussia Dortmund. He joined Liverpool in 2016 for a fee of 30 million Euros plus 2.5 million Euros in add-ons. 

He stayed in Liverpool for six seasons, ending the club’s 30-year wait for the Premier League title in 2020. He won also won the UEFA Champions League in 2019 by defeating Tottenham Hotspurs in the final in Madrid. In a total of 196 appearances for Liverpool in the Premier League, Sadio Mane has scored 90 goals.

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He joined Bayern Munich in the summer of 2022 as a replacement for Robert Lewandowski, who moved to Barcelona. As he left the Merseyside club, he took them to the UEFA Champions League final, a second-place finish in the Premier League, and won the English League Cup as well as the FA cup. 

He also won the Africa Cup of Nations with Senegal in 2022 and will be representing his country in the 2022 Qatar World Cup.