Mohamed Salah, Then and Now

His exit would've been unthinkable last summer but is not a surprise now. How on earth do Liverpool begin to replace one of their greatest ever players?

Mohamed Salah is leaving Liverpool. It may be the best ever example of how quickly things can change in football.

Fans would’ve been walking up the Walton Breck Road bearing flaming pitchforks had he been allowed to leave the club on a free transfer last summer. Yet his exit, less than a year later, has already felt inevitable for quite some time.

This doesn’t change that Salah is without question one of the Reds’ best ever players. Only 22 men have made more appearances for the club, most of whom pre-dated the Premier League era. Nobody with a decent sample has made goal contributions more frequently. If Sir Kenny Dalglish will never be dethroned as Liverpool’s greatest ever, he has an Egyptian king at his shoulder.

And although 2025/26 will go down as Salah’s worst campaign with the club, it’s remarkable how good a bad season can look once you stop to check. His nine assists are the most of any Liverpool player, with his per 90 minutes rate for the metric in line with his average for his career with the Reds. Salah has also created the most Opta-defined big chances, with Hugo Ekitike his only colleague who has taken more shots in such moves.

Only five players with at least 1,800 minutes are averaging more shots per 90 in the Premier League. A 33-year-old winger who is clearly still grieving a lost friend is ranked 15th in the strongest league in the world for non-penalty expected goals per 90 minutes. What any of us would trade to be one per cent as good as what has been a slump for a man with the highest of sky-high standards. We can only dream.

There are players with better goal averages in Europe’s big five leagues in 2025/26. Plenty have set up colleagues to score more frequently. If you want someone with north of Salah’s playing time who can at least match both his figures of 0.30 assists and 0.20 non-penalty goals per 90, you’ve only got six options though.

With his 34th birthday less than a month after what will be his final match in a Reds shirt, Salah is in an elite dual-threat septet that includes Arda Güler, Michael Olise and Lamine Yamal. One still a teenager, another barely 21 and the other not 25 until you’ll have your Christmas decorations up again. They are not as old now as Salah was when he joined Liverpool, never mind when he leaves the club.

How do you possibly replace even the supposedly finished version of the Reds’ number 11? Forget about peak Salah, even the battered, bruised and heartbroken 2025/26 edition will be a stretch. Yan Diomande is making an excellent case that he could be the man to follow the man, but he’s been covered in a previous edition of this newsletter. Let’s see who else is out there.

Diomande is Forever

None of the other players with good rates for goals and assists look like realistic options. Armand Lauriente (27 years old, Sassuolo), Federico Dimarco (28, Inter) and Luis Díaz (who?) are all too old to take on the task.

The men at other Premier League clubs with better shot rates are Matheus Cunha, Erling Haaland and Bukayo Saka. The latter is also one of just three players who are creating more open play chances per 90 than Salah, along with Florian Wirtz and Bruno Fernandes. We’re not seeing any transfer opportunities yet, are we?

If we look for footballers with better expected assist rates in open play, we have several of the aforementioned players plus Iliman Ndiaye, Adam Wharton, Pedro Neto and Enzo Fernández.

There is also Yankuba Minteh, who feels like the only one who could be a feasible winger target for the Reds. He has also previously played for Arne Slot, though that feels increasingly irrelevant with every passing week. But his non-penalty xG per rate is only half of Salah’s. The full package is incredibly hard to find.

We could defer to Opta Analyst. Here are the five players they say are currently most similar to Salah.

Ademola Lookman and Paulo Dybala immediately fail the age test. Alejandro Garnacho is an immediate no on multiple levels. Kenan Yildiz plays primarily on the left, plus he signed a four year contract extension last month. Former Wolves man Fábio Silva ticks the same boxes in not playing Salah’s position while also being tied up until 2030. The hunt continues.

Perhaps. It’s possible Liverpool won’t look to replace their departing hero directly. Yes, it’s time to float the ‘switch to a back three’ theory yet again. Allowing the Egyptian king to leave makes that system feel a little more plausible at the front end of the team.

No matter that there is a certain sense to that, Salah’s underlying output will need to be covered somewhere within the side. His level has been so high that the Moneyball line about ‘replacing him in the aggregate’ feels like a tall order.

Here are the players in England, France, Germany, Italy or Spain who can at least match his benchmarks for minutes, non-penalty xG and open play expected assists (xA) per 90 in 2025/26.

There are some already mentioned names, some ‘never going to happen’ transfers and several who failed the ‘no dickhead’ test long ago. Florian Thauvin is 33, Fisnik Asllani is a centre-forward by trade.

Monaco’s Maghnes Akliouche could be the one plausible option on the list. He’s only recently turned 24 years old and is a left-footed right winger who has two years remaining on his contract. He’s been linked with Liverpool in the past, albeit not by reliable sources (as far as I can find). The Transfer Flow wrote about him last May when one such rumour floated. The article concluded with “This dude rocks. Two thumbs up” and included this radar. I’m inclined to agree with their assessment.

If you apply our Salah xG and xA filters for the Champions League with a 600 minute minimum, Akliouche’s 0.26 non-penalty expected goals per 90 see him fall just short.

As the only men who would clear the bars in both their domestic league and Europe’s top club competitions are Díaz, Olise, Kylian Mbappé and Salah, there’s no shame in that. The Liverpool man leads the Champions League for open play expected assists per 90, by the way. It shows the difficulty the Reds will have in recruiting his successor.

Replacing the irreplaceable is the task. This is one king with few princes waiting in the wings as a suitable heirs to the throne.