Though these chants offer a symbolic celebration and acceptance of Salah’s faith, Khaliel and Uddin conceded that it’s still a far cry from rooting out Islamophobia in the country entirely. After all, how much can one person—even one as larger-than-life as Mo Salah—do to shift negative perceptions of a world religion? Is it too much to expect an athlete to change the way fans see his faith, simply by being himself?

When I posed these questions to Khaliel and Uddin, they told me Salah already has made a difference—even if it’s just an incremental one. “As much as I can campaign and go across the country doing talks and seminars and events, I don’t think it has as much of an impact as someone like a Mo Salah,” Uddin said. “Islam has a stigma attached to it in the U.K., and it’s fantastic that we have someone who is adored by not just Liverpool fans, but by everyone.”

“Even if we had a million Mo Salahs, there would still be plenty of more work to continue,” Khaliel said, before adding: “But he has made a massive difference, and long may that continue.”

Salah certainly isn’t the only Muslim soccer player playing for club teams in the U.K. and Europe, let alone at the World Cup. What appears to set him apart has as much to do with his performance on the pitch as it does off. Salah has been lauded for his prolific charitable giving. Much of that giving goes toward his native Egypt, where he has even taken part in an Egyptian government anti-drug campaign that reportedly prompted a surge in calls to drug rehabilitation hotlines. He has done all of this without being overtly political—an attribute that has undoubtedly helped make him a unifying force for Egyptians and Britons alike.

“He has stayed away from the things that are polarizing and he’s transcended politics,” Afshin Molavi, a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Foreign Policy Institute, told me. But he noted that Salah’s exceptional image could also present a sort of paradox. “The danger is that people will separate him from what they think of as those ‘other Muslims’ and that they will see him as exceptional,” he said. “And then in the event there’s a terror attack in London, we may go back to some of those same broad-brushstroke stereotypes and broad-brushstroke discrimination. But Mo Salah will be siloed.”

The risk Molavi describes is evident elsewhere. When the undocumented Malian migrant Mamoudou Gassama was awarded French citizenship last month for rapidly scaling a four-story building to rescue a child dangling from a balcony (a feat that earned him the nickname “Spiderman”), some observers highlighted the “good immigrant, bad immigrant” binary at play. “The bar for being a good immigrant is so high that you literally have to leap tall buildings in a single bound to meet it,” Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik wrote of the rescue in the New Statesman. “In a political climate where immigration in Europe is sending millions to the polls to vote for far-right parties, it is hard even for a migrant to do a good deed without it being used to perpetuate the polarization of the discussion.”

Mo Salah has captured the world’s attention despite all this. People admire him largely for the same reason great football players are emulated worldwide—because he is a spectacular athlete. He’s one who just so happens to be Muslim.