Bukayo Saka Won the Socrates Award in the Week His Body Stopped Him Playing

On Monday night at the London Palladium, Nigerian singer Burna Boy presented Bukayo Saka with the Socrates Award. Five days earlier he’d limped off. The prize honours work done away from football, and Saka collected it while a thigh injury kept him unable to play.

The winner’s name is kept back until the night itself. France Football, L’Équipe and Peace and Sport choose the recipient from the projects a player supports, with no published shortlist and no journalists’ vote. The 2026 ceremony was the prize’s fifth edition. The prize carries no direct financial reward.

France Football named the prize for Sócrates, the Corinthians captain who was also a medical doctor. He was a central figure in Corinthians Democracy. The movement pushed for votes on how the club was run while Brazil lived under a military dictatorship. He died in 2011 aged 57. His brother Rai sits on the jury. Rai has said Socrates believed sport could mobilise society toward equality.

Sadio Mané took the first prize in 2022. He funded a hospital and schools in Bambali, his home village in Senegal. Vinícius Júnior followed in 2023 for his Instituto Vini Jr, which uses technology to teach underprivileged children in Brazil, and for his fight against racism in Spanish stadiums.

The prize’s first woman winner was Jenni Hermoso, in 2024, recognised for her advocacy of gender equality and women’s rights in football. A year later the prize went to an organisation rather than a player. The Xana Foundation was set up by Paris Saint-Germain coach Luis Enrique and his wife Elena after their daughter Xana died aged nine of a rare bone cancer, and it supports seriously ill children and their families; Princess Charlene of Monaco presented its award at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.

Saka’s own record with Big Shoe began in November 2022, when he funded 120 operations for children in Kano, Nigeria. The children were treated for inguinal hernias, umbilical hernias and brain tumours, conditions their families couldn’t have paid to treat. Saka was 21. He was born in London to Nigerian parents, and he said at the time that he felt blessed to be able to make the children’s lives easier.

In Morocco, after the September 2023 earthquake, Saka and Big Shoe sent 50 container homes to Al Haouz and Taroudant. The containers were assembled into a village for 84 households, 255 people in all, 89 of them children, each unit fitted with a sleeping area, a kitchenette, a bathroom, power sockets and protective grills against further quakes. He also funded housing for families displaced by the earthquake in Turkey, on top of the Morocco village.

At the Palladium, Saka read out a message from Biringiro, a 14-year-old from Rwanda whose eyesight Big Shoe’s eye care restored. The boy had started losing his sight at 12 in a village without electricity. He can now read the blackboard from the back of the classroom, and wants to become an English teacher one day. Saka told the room about the joy a child feels with a ball at his feet, and closed with thanks on behalf of all the children they have been able to help.

Saka collected the award in a week when his football had already stopped. He lasted 10 minutes at Bayern. The thigh injury forced him off, and Eberechi Eze replaced him and scored. On Friday, Arteta said Saka needed another MRI because fluid around the muscle made the injury hard to judge, and the club feared at least six weeks out. Arsenal then beat Everton 2–0 on Saturday without him, with Ezri Konsa and Gabriel scoring.

Against Everton, Noni Madueke started on the right and impressed there, in a win that took Arsenal level with Manchester City at the top. Max Dowman came on for the final 10 minutes of the Everton game at the Emirates.