NO, IT'S NOT MY WISH TO BECOME PRESIDENT OF LIBERIA

Three decades ago, FFT labelled George Weah as Liberia's next head of state, just after he'd been voted as the best player in the world for 1995. We revisit the interview he gave us, as he insisted politics wasn't for him...

- Osasu Obayiuwana and Jenny Horrocks

This man is hot. Not content with being the reigning African Footballer of the Year and the first Ballon d'Or winner hailing from outside Europe, George Weah was also recently named by FIFA as the best player on the planet.

No sooner had he received the prize, he beckoned his mentor Arsene Wenger to join him on stage and handed it over.

For Weah, brilliance on the field and generosity off it come in equal measure.

After all, how many players would shoulder the financial burden for their own country's impoverished football federation? Weah is a riverside lad from Monrovia who would have been resigned to a career as a telephone technician, if not for the fame and fortune that football offered him instead.

The Lone Stars, as the Liberian national team are nicknamed, are his baby. He pays the air fares of his European-based team-mates to attend crucial matches, buys their kit and even dishes out the win bonuses. Weah effectively enabled Liberia to qualify for a first appearance at the Africa Cup of Nations.

He is perhaps football's best bargain buy of the past 10 years. Remarkably, the £6 million striking pearl - the price Milan paid Paris Saint-Germain in the summer already looks like exceptional value - once cost a paltry £12,000, when Monaco bought him from Cameroonian club Tonnerre Yaounde in 1988.

But Weah's transformation into a world-acclaimed goal-hunter who sat at the top of last season's Champions League scoring charts, even though PSG didn't make it to the final, has been no joyride. He's had to plot his success while coping with the haunting thought that his parents, caught up in the thick of Liberia's civil war, could easily have been butchered like so many others.

Under Wenger's tutelage at Monaco, Weah was able to develop his game. If his deftness of touch and natural sense of awareness doesn't scare the life out of the opposition, his powerful physique makes him almost unmarkable.