Amadou Haidara smiles when he remembers the good old days. The RB Leipzig midfielder thinks back to playing football on the streets of Bamako, the friends he made while rising through the ranks at the illustrious JMG academy and leaving Mali to pursue his dream of making it as a professional. “I was 18,” Haidara says. “It was hard to leave my family. But it was important to work hard. You have to make sacrifices to reach your goals.”
The Mali international did not want anything to get in his way. As a boy Haidara was so desperate to help his teammates that he tried to play on with a knee injury during an important youth match. “I felt the pain,” he says. “But it wasn’t right to let my team play without me. I kept playing and my knees started to swell up, so the coach eventually took me off. I was crying because I couldn’t help my teammates. It was so hard to watch them from the side.”
