A secret promise and a well-crafted scenario: behind the scenes of the Mohamed El Shenawy and Hossam Hassan crisis
What happened before the Egypt and Iran match?
The injury alone did not spark Mohamed El Shenawy's discontent with Egypt head coach Hossam Hassan. The roots of the crisis run deeper, back to an incident during Egypt's participation in the 2026 World Cup, specifically before the third group-stage match against Iran.
El Shenawy picked up the injury with Al Ahly before Hossam Hassan named his squad for the games against Angola and South Sudan on 25 and 29 September, part of the first and second rounds of the 2027 Africa Cup of Nations qualifiers, plus the friendly against South Africa on 4 October.
Journalist Karim Rezkallah laid out the details of the crisis. The tension, he explained, began after El Shenawy received an earlier promise from the coaching staff that he would start against Iran, provided the national team officially secured qualification to the next round.
El Shenawy requests clarification
Egypt came close to qualifying. Then came the surprise on matchday, when the starting line-up appeared with Mostafa Shobier in goal instead of El Shenawy. The Al Ahly captain was furious, feeling the earlier agreement had not been respected.
Rezkallah explained that once the national team's bus reached the stadium, El Shenawy told one of the administrators he felt upset and asked that his position be conveyed to Ibrahim Hassan. He even suggested he might not sit on the substitutes' bench, especially with four goalkeepers in the match squad.
By the same account, Ibrahim Hassan stepped in to calm things down, before he and Hossam Hassan sat down with El Shenawy and Mostafa Shobier.
During that meeting, Hossam Hassan told Shobier he had previously promised El Shenawy a start and asked him to let the goalkeeper take his place. Shobier agreed without objection.
An administrative decision halted the change
The plan fell apart. Administrator Walid Badr intervened, telling the coaching staff that the official match sheet, or what is known as the "score sheet", had already gone to the organising committee.
Any change to the line-up at that moment would therefore have counted as the first official change of the match. So the announced line-up stood and Mostafa Shobier started.
El Shenawy accepted the situation at first. Doubt crept in later, though, once it struck him that the whole thing may have been a scenario prepared in advance to absorb his anger and contain his objection to the broken promise.
That incident remains, according to the circulating account, one of the reasons for the tension between El Shenawy and the Egypt national team staff, just as the goalkeeper prepares to return to Egypt's plans after recovering from injury.
