George Weah
George Weah is the only footballer to have won the Ballon d'Or and a presidency, and the first Liberian head of state in seventy-four years to hand power to an elected opponent. He grew up in the Clara Town slum of Monrovia and was spotted by Arsène Wenger and taken to Monaco in 1988. He became at Paris Saint-Germain and Milan the best forward in the world, FIFA's player of the year and Europe's in 1995, the first African to win either. He paid for Liberia's national team out of his own pocket through the civil war years and campaigned for UNICEF, which is the reputation he took into politics when he retired in 2003. He ran for president in 2005, won the first round, and lost the run-off to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, whose supporters made much of his lack of a high-school diploma. He went back to school, took a degree in Miami, was elected senator for Montserrado County in 2014, and won the presidency in 2017 with over sixty per cent in the run-off against her vice-president. The inauguration in January 2018 was the first transfer of power between elected presidents in Liberia since 1944. The term disappointed: the economy stalled, the currency fell, a hundred million dollars in newly printed banknotes went missing in 2018 in a scandal the government never satisfactorily explained, and the corruption the country had hoped a rich man would not need spread instead. In 2023 he lost the run-off to Joseph Boakai, Sirleaf's old vice-president, by twenty thousand votes, and conceded on the radio the same night before the count was final, which in West Africa that year was the news. He left office in January 2024 and went back to the football he had never really left.
- Lived: 1966 CE – ?
- Nationality: Liberian
- Roles: head_of_state, footballer
