Assessing Mohamed Salah's Unlikely Assist Total

Mohamed Salah has 16 assists in the 2024/25 Premier League. Only five men have got more in a single campaign. But has the Liverpool man been lucky?

The British were built for social media. There is something in the nation’s psyche that sees them happy to build someone up until they make it big, only to then tear them down. We love an underdog, underplaying the success of anyone fortunate enough to be so blessed, often by denigrating them with comparisons to superior talent.

Ahem. Sorry about that, Eden. Anyway, social media was designed for negativity so the British were designed for social media. Stirring in the tribal nature of football fandom gives you a powder keg of bitterness and stupidity, primed to explode.

Mohamed Salah is having one of the greatest individual campaigns seen in the modern era of football. Not just in England either, you can throw France, Germany, Italy and Spain into the mix. His total of 41 combined goals and assists is the 27th most a player has amassed in a single season in Europe’s big five leagues since the early 1990s. Maintaining his current rate of output across the final 11 matches would see Salah finish with 58 goal contributions.

It’s GOAT-level output, so what do people do? Pick holes in the numbers, as if the success Salah has enjoyed this season is thoroughly unmerited.

"He’s scored a few penalties.” So did 24 of the 26 men above him in the big league standings. Ciro Immobile is only there because he scored 14 spot kicks in one season. FOURTEEN.

“He’s over-achieved against his expected goals.” As it’s based on averages, a greatly above average player should exceed numerical expectation. Being flawless from the spot (in the league) has obviously helped Salah, with 24 big league players out performing their non-penalty xG by wider margins in 2024/25. If you want to talk unsustainable, check our Mateo Retegui’s 19 non-penalty goals from 9.7 expected if you want to talk unlikely goal scoring feats. Brits will love it if he comes to the Premier League and flops.

“He’s got an unfeasible assist total.” This is harder to refute, partly because it might be true, partly due to potential misunderstanding around expected assists. People are more accustomed to looking at under or over-performance with xG, plus a creator is always reliant upon their teammates’ finishing. Salah is currently 6.1 assists above his underlying numbers, a mark only topped seven times in the big leagues since 2017.

A-ha. Got ‘im. He’s a fraud, everyone. Pile on when you’re ready.

We could do that. Or, we could take a step back, dig into the numbers, see what they say. Maybe there’s a reason Salah has more assists for Liverpool than you might reasonably expect from his creative work in 2024/25. Yeah. Let’s check that.

The Egyptian King’s unlikely performance for creativity has at least come from a solid foundation. Fulham full-back Antonee Robinson has set up 10 goals from just 3.4 expected, an overachievement rate of 194.1 per cent. Salah’s 61.6 per cent (thanks to 16 from 9.9 xAG) looks thoroughly mundane by comparison.

He also creates really, really valuable chances. If we rank the 26 assists Robinson and Salah have collectively mustered by their expected goal value, the Fulham defender is responsible for six of the bottom eight whereas the Liverpool man has delivered the top seven.

Mikel Damsgaard and Bukayo Saka have, like Robinson, 10 Premier League assists to their name this term, putting them joint-second in the standings behind the Reds’ 32-year-old. We can add the goals they have created to our bucket to make a sample of 46, but Salah has still delivered five of the nine highest xG chances that have gone on to be converted.

You can see Salah only has two assists from chances which were below the average xG level for a non-penalty shot in the Premier League this term. Of the three men with 10 goals created, Saka may have the most similar spread to his positional peer at Liverpool. The title race would inevitably look rather different now had Salah suffered the bad injury which has kept his Arsenal counterpart out of action.

We could compile similar data for every assist in 2024/25. However, they carry the confirmation bias of having become goals. Looking at all chances created would give a good overview of how Salah compares to his Liverpool teammates.

In episode 53 of Distance Covered podcast, I suggested the reason Salah is able to overachieve his expected assists is because he predominantly sets up high value chances with little else. The Liverpool number 11 is frequently in or near the opposition penalty area, meaning he is rarely passing to colleagues a long way out. They in turn cannot then ruin his creativity data with low-value, poorly thought out shots. Or so the theory goes, at least.

Episode #053: Lionel Messi

It makes sense to group the chances into value brackets, so that the data isn’t too granular. Here’s the logic behind the four ranges chosen:

• Less than 0.07 xG - these are below the average rate for a non-big chance in the penalty area. Suboptimal shots;

• 0.07 to 0.11 - these go from average regular chances in the box to the average full stop;

• 0.12 to 0.38 - this covers the shots between the mean value and those of an average Opta-defined big chance;

• 0.39 or above - the juiciest of opportunities, desperate to be scored.

Here is the breakdown for those created by Salah versus every other non-penalty shot Liverpool have had in the Premier League this season. The range values work out well in the case of the Egyptian, as he has a fairly even split between the first three of them.

This broadly backs up my theory regarding Salah’s creativity, if not as emphatically as I would have assumed. Over two-thirds of the chances he has created have carried the value of an average shot in the box at worst. It is telling that the average distance of a Mo-powered attempt has been 14 yards from goal, compared to 16 for all other efforts by the Reds.

We have established that Salah is above average when compared to the collective creative efforts of his 10 teammates on the pitch. How about the rest of the division across the last eight campaigns? For this we’ll look at average xG value per key pass. Doing this for players with a sample size at least equal to Salah this season reveals something remarkable about the former Roma man.

Liverpool’s right forward has delivered three of the seven best campaigns for average quality of chances created. Kudos, Mo. Look at the dark blue lines, which show the assist rates for the top 10, though; Salah has overachieved twice, with a noticeably sizeable margin in his favour in 2024/25.

Luck always plays a part. The soon-to-be-out-of-contract star (shh) has assisted two of the Reds’ four deflected league goals this season. He also set up Darwin Núñez for his belting 0.04 xG strike against Bournemouth at Anfield when others - hi, Dom - have seen much better chances squandered by the erratic Uruguayan.

But then two things can be simultaneously true. If, as it appears, Salah has benefited from a touch of fortune this term, he has done so while providing a higher average quality of chance than just about anyone in football’s data age. Antonee Robinson has been lucky; Salah has been creatively elite.

Data correct on February 24, 2025