Omar Marmoush isn’t thinking about the World Cup just yet. That’s his story, at least, and he’s sticking to it. Yes, he knows that in around two weeks he’ll be leading the line for Egypt in the greatest football tournament on Earth, but honestly, it just hasn’t crossed his mind.

Nobody on the Zoom call – and there’s a few of us – ranging from Omar’s team to some Manchester City observers, is convinced. That’s a guess on my part, admittedly, but caution isn’t really part of the Cairo-born striker’s makeup. Any coyness here is likely two-fold: Firstly, interviews in the modern age are a dangerous soup for footballers, and just the slightest misstep has the potential to summon social media’s football rabble rousers. Secondly, he’s part of a belligerent Manchester City side that had – until last week’s 1-1 draw with Bournemouth – refused to give up on the Premier League title, in a season that had already yielded both League and FA Cups. So, let’s call this World Cup omerta what it is: focus. Marmoush has plenty of that.

When the Egyptian striker arrived at the club in January 2025, there was an element of whispered transition about the place. Questions swirled regarding the future of epochal manager Pep Guardiola, while the likes of Kyle Walker and Kevin De Bruyne – integral fixtures in a team that had won four English top-flight titles in a row – parted ways with the club. The season would end as the first without a trophy in almost eight years, the first since Guardiola’s debut season, in fact.

Marmoush was part of a mid-season injection of fresh blood, one of four big-money signings – along with Abdukodir Khusanov, Vitor Reis, and Nico González – that, given time and fair opportunity, were there to help the dynasty power up. Part of an occasional, yet, essential changing of the guard.

“As a kid you dream of being at a club like this,” he says, showing no visible signs of peril from the weight of expectation. “I trained hard to get here, you know? My whole career led up to this point – to compete and play with the best players in the world, trying to win titles. So, when the move came I knew I was ready.”

That quiet assurance isn’t arrogance or cockiness. It’s confidence. The type developed over time on a route to the top that feels more old school than most. Marmoush wasn’t a big-club starboy, groomed for glory by the age of eight, and armed with TikTok reels that made him the talk of a fanbase. Far from it. After starting out at local side Wadi Degla, the rapid forward moved away from home when he was just 18. Egypt to Germany – not just cities or countries but continents. He spent time roughing it in European second strings and on loan spells, making gradual progress. For him, football was the only option. But he quickly learned that the major success he craved would mean saying goodbye to Egypt.

“I was waiting to turn 18 and leave,” he says. “I had played in the first team already but it was clear, when I started to get older, that I would have to go elsewhere to achieve my dreams. I got an offer from [German side] Wolfsburg and spent two weeks there training. It was a big move… a huge move, I was very young, but I didn’t really think about whether it would be difficult or not. I just went.”

Sometime in the late 1980s, a myth grew around the former Liverpool striker Ian Rush who, after signing for the Italian side Juventus in 1986, returned home rather sharply after just one year away from the UK. When asked about the experience, football folklore stated that the Welshman replied, “I couldn’t settle in Italy… it was like living in a foreign country.” Rush later denied ever saying it, but the story has endured regardless.

Being homesick wasn’t really an issue for Marmoush, at least when he was playing. After all, his parents had travelled with him when he first left (“They brought Egypt with them!”), and he was fully focused on assimilation. “I wanted to learn the language quickly. It helped me get to know my teammates and understand their culture, how they act, how they speak, and what they demand on and off the pitch. It was good that I wasn’t shy. I would just try and speak [German] with them. I got lots of things wrong at first, and my teammates would laugh at me, but I think they appreciated the effort. Now I’m fluent.”

Around the time Manchester City got googly-eyed for the Egyptian, Marmoush made up one-half of a top young striking duo in Germany. Both he and Frenchman Hugo Ekitike had got there the hard way. Ekitike’s big move from Stade de Reims to PSG had failed to ignite, while Marmoush had signed a professional contract with Wolfsburg, and had loan spells, first with St. Pauli in the second tier, and then at Stuttgart in the Bundesliga. He had been steady, with moments of the spectacular knitting things together. He eventually joined Eintracht Frankfurt on a free transfer and suddenly everything clicked. A debut season saw 16 goals in 37 games – along with alleged interest from the likes of Liverpool, Arsenal, and Newcastle United – before a second season took him into the stratosphere. His partnership that second year with Ekitike, himself in his first full season with the Germans, was defined by dazzling pace and ruthless finishing, by movement and menace. By Christmas, Marmoush had hit 15 goals in 17 games, and was second in the goalscoring charts only to Harry Kane. By January he was on a plane to Manchester.

“It wasn’t just that one or two years [that secured the transfer],” he points out. “It was much longer. You build confidence over time, you learn your worth. So, when the move happened I knew I was supposed to be there. But still, the change was weird. One day you’re at one club, the next day somewhere completely different with a different atmosphere, and already playing. January transfers always go fast. Not like in the summer when you have a pre-season to acclimatise. Suddenly I was playing in a new league, and with a different intensity. But I was confident.”

Just over a full season in and you feel that Marmoush is only getting started at The Etihad. He loves life at City, and in the Premier League. The English passion for football matches the fervour he found in Frankfurt (“their support was just crazy”) and for the Egyptian national team, too (“they can fill 90-100,000 capacity stadiums easily”). But the buzz he gets from playing in the biggest league in the world is undoubtedly a trip.

“It has fulfilled all my expectations and more,” he gushes. “I would watch the Premier League a lot before I arrived, but to play here is different. It’s way more intense in real life.” There have been big moments, too, glistening signs of golden promise, like his Premier League goal of the season against Bournemouth last year – a run and viciously dipping shot that flew into the top corner from around 30 yards.

“He’s a special player,” said Guardiola of Marmoush following a 5-2 win over Crystal Palace in 2025. “He’s not old, not young, and still has a margin to improve,” he continued, after the Egyptian scored the equaliser in a game where his team had, at one point, been trailing 2-0.

But acclimatisation takes time, and playing at a club such as Manchester City comes with a high element of jeopardy. At Frankfurt there’s an argument to say Marmoush could have had the occasional off day, and still been one of the first names on the teamsheet the following week. But when a squad is stocked full of stars, decisions on who play are made on the finest of margins. Especially when you're toiling through the longest football season in Europe.

The phrase that football is a squad game has become dog-eared now. But it’s a truth self-evident for teams such as Manchester City who, generally, play three games per week at the highest level for the majority of the season. In 2024/25 that amounted to 60 games, which meant the club needed to safeguard against injury, suspension, dips in form, physical overload, as well as having a tactical flexibility to consistently hunt for trophies across four competitions. That comes in the form of regular squad rotation. When we talk about how seven of his 14 goals in England have come against Newcastle United he insists there is no Geordie vendetta, but rather that he was simply on the pitch from the first whistle.

“Newcastle play in an attacking, aggressive style, which means you can sometimes find space between the lines,” he says. “That’s something that I can exploit. But I’d say that, in these games, I started. That gives you a better chance of scoring goals.”

In November 2025, The Athletic wrote about the concept of ‘Haaland Purgatory’, a reference to the struggle attacking players can find at Manchester City when trying to dislodge superstar striker Erling Haaland as the fulcrum of the team’s attack. The article referenced Julián Alvarez, the Argentine who struggled for game time between 2022 and 2024. Alvarez eventually left for Atlético Madrid. It’s the type of situation built to dent confidence and squash dreams if you’re not careful. But Marmoush isn’t fazed. He simply takes any and all competition as fuel for the fire.

“It’s difficult but at the same time it makes you better, knowing that when you’re on the pitch you have to give your best. You have to perform because the next person is there, waiting to take your spot. Small details are vital. Who is willing to put more effort in? Who is willing to work harder and try to prove himself? This type of competition only serves to improve you as a player, because if you don’t play regularly you start to think, okay, what can I do to be better?”

It’s a remarkably even-minded opinion in a sport fraught with an instant pressure to perform. Nowhere more so than across social media which, at its worst, can be a hellscape when it comes to in-game appraisal. It’s something that has led to the likes of Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka, and Trent Alexander-Arnold stepping back from platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), and away from the negativity that often feeds it. Marmoush feels like he’s got a handle on things. And while modern football clubs have mental health practitioners in place, the Egyptian prefers to keep his counsel slightly closer to home.

“I have spoken with people [provided by the club] on different things… visualisation techniques, how to perform better on the pitch, things like that. The methods are broad, but you eventually learn what works for you. For me, the biggest help comes from my fiancée. She’s the one who encouraged me to talk about these things in the first place. Speaking to her makes me feel comfortable. I talk about whatever’s on my mind, and it helps me a lot.”

Pressure has always had a certain resonance when it comes to athletes, of course. But it’s often framed as a challenge rather than a problem to be eradicated. When the game is in the balance, are you able to step away from the stress that lives between success and failure and take control of the situation? At Manchester City that tension is woven into the crest.

“My expectations of myself are always the same, but the demands on the pitch are much different here,” says Marmoush. “Frankfurt is a big club, for example, but occasionally we would celebrate winning a game because we put so much work into it, and sometimes you’re not expected to win against certain teams. At City it’s not about winning today, or scoring some goals, it’s about winning titles. Football is what I love,” he says, shrugging off those imperatives. “Being on the pitch makes me happy. And the achievement you get when you’re impactful in the game brings a sense of fulfilment – the hard work I put in is paying off. I think if I ever felt too tired to play it’s a sign that the game is over for me, and I should do something else instead.”

That differing expectation is an interesting thought when it comes to how Egypt performs at this summer’s World Cup. And although Marmoush’s focus is set rigidly on the remainder of the Premier League season, he does allow himself to mull over the tournament’s scope for greatness.

“I remember Zinedine Zidane’s Panenka against Italy in the 2006 final – and his sending off – Brazilian Ronaldo… and Ronaldinho, too. He was my favourite. I loved how happy he was, just playing with a smile. I think that’s the main reason I loved to watch him, because he played with the passion and happiness that we all have inside of us.”

When it comes to mentality, there’s certainly been a shift around MENA nations at the World Cup Finals in recent years. In 2016, the documentary Lights of Rome recounted the UAE’s golden generation of players who got to the World Cup Finals in 1990. In it, the UAE coach Carlos Alberto Parreira – who also spent time as coach of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, as well as Brazil – suggested that qualifying for the World Cup Finals was akin to winning it for a nation like the UAE, such was the disparity in the global football economy. Now, as we await a tournament featuring a record nine teams from the MENA region, things have gone way past just making up the numbers.

“I think the World Cup is a football moment where you can dream to go as far as possible,” says Omar Marmoush, now lowering his guard on tournament-related questions. “We’ve seen recently with Morocco reaching the semi-final in 2022 that anything is possible. After the group stage [Egypt’s includes Belgium, New Zealand, and Iran] you just take it one game at a time. You have to be realistic, of course. We’re playing against the best national teams in the world, so it’s not easy. But we always dream big. It’s great that we have so many MENA teams at the tournament this year, but it’s not just about numbers. We want to go there and perform. Here we are, playing on the biggest stage in world football. Let’s show them what we’ve got.”

See the full GQ All-Stars lineup.

Production by Studio Bruciato
Creative Producer, Chiara Mannarino
Grooming by Terri Grisdale
Production Assistant, Elsa Johnson
Fashion Assistants, Lily D’Abreo and Milena Jones
Digital Operation by Harry Gillespie
Lighting Operation by Sara Zourki and Joel Dykes

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