The Egyptian national team will train in Spokane as long as they are competing in the World Cup.
After touring downtown Spokane on Tuesday afternoon, the team let about five hundred fans watch them train at Gonzaga University's Luger field for a couple hours starting around noon on Wednesday.
The lucky attendees had been randomly selected from a lottery run by the city of Spokane.
Seattleite Omar Mazhar said he and his friends put all their family member’s names in that lottery.
“We've been like scouting the entire time," he said. "We knew that they were going to be here and we wanted any opportunity to come see them.”
As excited as fans were, most of them were nearly silent the entire practice. The bleachers gave a smattering of applause during a few moments of 11-on-11, but a hanging hush suggested either confusion or awe.
"They need to invent a word for what we're feeling right now," said Hamza Elmetwally, who traveled from Seattle with Mazhar.
Local fans were also somewhere between impressed and shocked.
"It's just really cool that a country team's practicing in Spokane," said twelve-year-old Connor, who was watching with his dad, Darrin Blume.
"We're actually going to go to the Belgium-Egypt game," the boy's dad said. "As soon as they announced the World Cup, we were going to go to at least one game...[but] watching them here, we get to see tactics and training. I'm his coach, so I get to talk to him about what they're doing and why they're doing it and all that stuff."
Most people at the practice were especially thrilled to see Egypt's captain and star player Mohamed Salah, who set records during his time at Liverpool FC in England's Premier League.
“It's crazy. There's no like, I don't think there's an explanation for it," Mazhar said. "It's crazy to see him up close because we've been watching him our entire lives on television."
“He really—he brought respect to our nation, I think. He put us on the map," Elmetwally said. "He's a legend in soccer. Nobody's ever put up the numbers, not even Messi or Ronaldo. They haven't put up the numbers like Salah has in the past nine years, and he's just going to go down as a legend in the game.”
"Seeing Mo Salah train in Spokane—it's just it's a wild sentence to say," said Nick Davis, and assistant soccer coach at the University of Idaho.
But Salah wasn't the only player Davis was paying attention to.
"I'm a goalkeeper coach. So, you know, I got to give some love to the goalkeepers as well," Davis said. "I love seeing how they're training and kind of the things they're doing—maybe pick some stuff up and use it at Idaho."
Egypt will play two group stage games in Seattle, first against Belgium and then against Iran.
Mazhar and Elmetwally said they’ll be at both—but the open training session was especially unique.
"There is no word that can describe our happiness and, like, just inside of us—something feels fulfilled," Elmetwally said. "We got to see the guy that we grew up watching every single day, in person. All Egyptian kids around the world idolize him and watch him and, just to see him like 30 feet away from us is insane.”
