Sadio Mane saw his World Cup dream crashing down on the eve of the tournament as a knee injury ruled him out of a trip to Qatar.
While his Senegal teammates were flying to the Middle East, Mane was lying in a hospital bed in Innsbruck, Austria undergoing knee surgery. Just down the corridor, a young footballer aspiring to follow in his footsteps was facing the same fate.
Maxi Scharfetter grew up in Salzburg, watching Mane in his formative years from the terraces as he made his name for Red Bull Salzburg before joining Liverpool. As Mane headed to Merseyside, Scharfetter also left Salzburg to chase his football dream, leaving his family behind six years ago to join the academy of Wolfsberger AC, a team in the Austrian Bundesliga.
The winger, who sometimes plays right-back or striker due to their formation, has already had to contend with a number of injuries and, in the final game of the year, suffered a serious knee injury which landed him in the same clinic as Mane.
“In the 20th minute I made a sprint, wanted to stop and pass the ball then my left knee just buckled inwards,” he explains.
Hours after his surgery, he saw a post from Bayern Munich which indicated Mane was in the same clinic where he had just undergone his procedure. Eventually, he could not resist the urge to go and ask for a picture - but he could never have anticipated the hour-long chat that followed.
“I had surgery, and on the day of my surgery, in the evening, I was on Instagram and a friend sent me the new post of Bayern Munich,” he recalls.
“On the post was that Sadio Mane had an injury, but the doctor was a doctor in the same clinic as me and I was like, ‘oh my god, Sadio Mane, I think he’s also here’.
“I asked a lot of friends, should I ask him for a picture or not? I wanted to respect his privacy and I thought maybe it’s not so good to ask for a picture because he’s injured, he’s probably feeling down because he missed the World Cup.
“Then I just thought, ‘no, I have to try because if I don’t I will regret it’. The next day, I found him in the hospital and asked for a picture.
“He’s a special player for me because I remember him from the Salzburg times, watching him when I was a kid and I loved him as a player. The next years, also, at Liverpool, I followed his career.
“It was not just the picture because we began to talk and we spoke for over an hour which was incredible for me. The whole time I was very, very nervous because I went in his room and I was like, ‘oh my gosh, there’s Sadio Mane!’.
“I said ‘hey’ to him and straight away he said, ‘how are you my friend? What happened?’. I couldn’t believe it because he talked to me like we were best friends.
“It wasn’t like he was arrogant at all, he was great, and it meant a lot to me. The best thing was the words he said to me.
“He said a lot of motivating things to me. For example, he said my injury has a reason, and that there’s something bigger behind this injury.
“It’s a nice thing for a young player like me to hear such motivating things from someone like that. He said that I have to promise him I will work so hard and he knows I will go on my own path.
“For me, it was crazy to meet him, Sadio is one of the best players in the world, he’s won everything like boys like me could only wish for. He’s a very humble guy, for sure, and he knows where he comes from.
“It was so motivating for me. Injuries are not always easy, then you meet a player like Mane, he says such motivating things to you, it’s unbelievable.”
As the pair go their separate ways onto their own comeback trails, Mane's final words as Scharfetter hobbled out of his hospital room remain ringing in his ears.
“The last thing he said to me as I left the room was ‘maybe one day we'll play a Champions League final together’," he says. "So now I think that would be a nice story!
"To meet him in a hospital and maybe four years later, play against Sadio Mane in a Champions League final, that would be a dream."
