Mohamed Salah's Lesson in Fickle Finishing

Mohamed Salah has scored two goals in two games after a bad run. His standards have slipped but have Liverpool done all they can on the pitch to help?

Football is so random. The best player or team can go on an epic slump while another side can amass win after win that they don’t deserve.

Liverpool and Mohamed Salah recently fell head first into the former category. The Egyptian went four starts without a goal, though the greater concern was that he looked like he’d barely seen a football before, never mind played the game. His touch was so off that finishing was the least of his worries.

Salah then lashed home a brilliant strike with his weaker foot at Brentford, before being handed a gift by Emiliano Martínez on Saturday. Drought ended, he is back on track to be the most productive 33-year-old the Premier League has ever seen.

Only the latter of these two goals was classified as a big chance by official data provider Opta. Liverpool’s number 11 had been on a run with these golden opportunities so poor that it would embarrass Darwin Núñez.

We’ll ignore penalties in this study as they are their own thing. Salah converted his final big chance last season after missing 11 in a row, then put one away from his first 10 in 2025/26. He scored just two out of 22, a nine per cent conversion rate when four times that still wouldn’t reach par.

To frame it another way, if we assign each big chance the average value for one rather than focussing on individual shot xG, a player is likelier to score 15 of 22 (which has a 0.35% probability) than two (0.25%). Yet as crazy as it sounds to say for a man with 250 Liverpool goals, Salah hasn’t been a spectacular finisher over the years.

Per FBRef, he has scored 8.8 non-penalty Premier League goals more than expected during his time with the Reds. He was, however, at +8.4 after his incredible first campaign. Salah’s 887 shots since the summer of 2018 have seen him collect 0.4 goals above xG, or 0.0005 per shot. Anyone got a microscope?

Despite this, he has usually kept his head above water for converting big chances. So what happened? Was he at fault or was it the opportunities themselves? Let’s review some numbers and clips.