Mohamed Salah’s importance to Egypt is so much that the country’s minister of sport has stepped in to mediate the image rights dispute between the Liverpool star and the national team.

With little more than six weeks to go before the World Cup, sports minister Khaled Abd Elaziz is doing his best to solve the dispute – insisting that the government ‘won’t allow anything to influence his concentration’.

Watch the full, extraordinary interview from an Egyptian TV channel below: