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