In football, few things can unsettle a player more than the unexpected. But what happened on a rainy night in the Saudi Pro League last month has already become the stuff of locker-room legend, and the clip is blowing up across social media for good reason.

Everyone knows Sadio Mané and Seko Fofana are close. The Senegalese superstar and the Ivorian midfielder arrived at Al-Nassr together in the summer of 2023, quickly forming one of the tightest friendships in the league. They train together, pray together, celebrate together, and even finish each other’s sentences in press conferences. So when Al-Nassr faced Al-Ettifaq in October, Mané expected another routine evening of tormenting defenders and hugging Fofana at full time.

He never expected to see Fofana lining up against him… twice.

Unbeknownst to almost the entire football world, Seko Fofana has an identical twin brother, Guessouma Fofana, who plays as a rock-hard defensive midfielder for Al-Ettifaq. The twins are so alike that even their own mother jokes she sometimes mixes them up when they’re wearing the same hairstyle. Until this season, the brothers had never played against each other as professionals. Their paths simply never crossed in France, Turkey, or the Middle East, until fate (and the Saudi Pro League fixture computer) decided otherwise.

The moment everyone is talking about happened in the tunnel before kick-off.

Mané, laughing and joking as usual, turned the corner chatting with Al-Nassr’s kit man. Then he froze. Standing ten metres away in Al-Ettifaq’s green warm-up top was… Seko Fofana. Same height, same build, same cheekbones, same trademark braided hair with faded sides. Mané’s smile vanished. His eyes widened. For a split second the two-time Champions League winner looked genuinely lost, like someone had just broken the simulation.

According to players who were there, Mané’s first words were a stunned whisper in Wolof: “Seko… what the hell?”

Guessouma, who had clearly been waiting for this exact reaction, just smirked and lifted his hands as if to say, “Surprise.”

Mané took one hesitant step forward, then another, staring as if he was trying to spot a single difference. He circled his teammate’s twin like a detective examining a perfect forgery. Then he burst out laughing, grabbed Guessouma by the shoulders and shouted loud enough for the entire tunnel to hear: “Bro, this is NOT fair! This is cheating! How am I supposed to play football now? I’m going to pass to the wrong Fofana!”

The clip, filmed on a phone by Al-Nassr’s media team, has already racked up 28 million views. You can literally see the gears turning in Mané’s head as his brain tries to process the information. One second he’s shaking his head in disbelief, the next he’s hugging Guessouma like a long-lost cousin, then turning to the real Seko (standing five metres behind him) and yelling, “You kept this secret for TWO YEARS? I hate you!”

What followed on the pitch was pure comedy.

Every time Mané got the ball in the first half, he would glance up, see a Fofana running toward him in a green shirt, hesitate for a quarter of a second, then either nutmeg the wrong twin or try an unnecessary rainbow flick just to be 100 % sure who he was embarrassing. Guessouma, for his part, refused to speak English the entire match, only responding in French with Seko’s exact Ivorian accent just to mess with Mané’s head even more.

At one point in the 38th minute, Mané intercepted a pass, looked up, and saw both Fofana twins sprinting at him from different angles. The Senegalese winger actually stopped dead, put the ball under his foot, and started laughing so hard he had to wipe tears from his eyes while the referee waited. Cristiano Ronaldo, standing nearby, just threw his arms in the air as if to say, “What is happening to my team?”

Post-match, Mané couldn’t stop talking about it.

“I swear, I nearly had a heart attack in the tunnel,” he told reporters, still giggling. “I thought Seko had cloned himself! I kept looking at Guessouma thinking, ‘When did my friend become so evil on the pitch?’ Then I realised, no, this is the evil twin! Seko is the nice one!”

Guessouma, meanwhile, was loving every second of the chaos he’d caused. “Seko warned me Sadio would lose his mind,” he said. “He wasn’t lying. I’ve never seen a Ballon d’Or runner-up look so confused in my life.”

The twins later revealed they had been planning the prank for months. They deliberately kept their identical status quiet in Saudi Arabia, even choosing slightly different hairstyles at the start of the season to avoid suspicion. When the fixture list came out and they saw they’d be facing each other, they made a pact: whoever won the match got to pick the loser’s hairstyle for a month.

Al-Nassr won 3-1. Guessouma now has blonde highlights whether he likes it or not.

Since the game, the “Fofana Twins” have become a social media sensation. Fans have edited the tunnel footage with horror movie music, X-Files themes, and even the Spider-Man pointing meme with three Spider-Men. One viral post simply says: “Imagine training with a guy every day for two years and then discovering he has an identical twin who tackles like a truck.”

For Mané, the whole experience has just deepened his bond with both brothers. He now calls them “my two Sekos” and has promised to buy Guessouma dinner the next time Al-Ettifaq visit Riyadh, “but only if he promises not to wear green so my brain doesn’t explode again.”

Football is full of rivalries, drama, and controversy. But sometimes the most unforgettable moments have nothing to do with goals or trophies. Sometimes all it takes is one identical twin in the wrong coloured shirt to remind us why we fell in love with this mad game in the first place.

And somewhere in Riyadh, Sadio Mané is still checking twice before he passes to anyone named Fofana.