Mohamed Salah's Radar Love

When data paints a surprising picture

There’s a fantastic browser extension called FBCHARTS that produces a radar of stats for any player on their FBRef page. You can also overlay one radar over another, enabling a comparison of players which will prove definitively and without question who is better than whom.

This is the obvious starting point for using this tool. Who doesn’t love arguing about sport on the internet? Don’t ask me; I posted the above radar on X without a comment then muted the conversation immediately. Thanks, but no thanks.

There are other, far more intriguing, applications for radar comparisons. When a club signs a player, it does so in the hope they will improve their squad and ideally their starting XI. The idea will be for the footballer to deliver what they gave to their previous club as a baseline, then improve from there.

So, who has done this? By using scouting reports from different seasons for one player, we can see how their performance changed, if it did. A good idea in theory, experimenting with radars reveals a key issue that is often overlooked by fans when transfers occur. Many players who change clubs aren’t expected to fulfil identical roles within both teams.

Liverpool’s transfer business from the summer of 2023 is Exhibit A. Let’s start with Alexis Mac Allister (and please forgive a little generalising). In his final Brighton season, he either played in the holding pair or as the number 10 in a 4-2-3-1 system. At Liverpool, he was the sole six or an eight in a 4-3-3 formation. Trying to compare all of that under the umbrella term of midfielder is pointless.

Similarly, Dominik Szoboszlai was previously a wide forward or the right-sided attacking midfielder in a different set up to that deployed by Jürgen Klopp. Wataru Endō had the most similar role for his two clubs in the last two seasons, but one battled relegation whereas the other challenged for the league title.

Playing around with radars highlighted one thing of interest, though. If you compare Liverpool’s Ryan Gravenberch with the version from his final season at Ajax, you get a neat visualisation of what might be called the Eredivisie tax on multiple metrics.

There’s another fascinating angle for using multiple radars for a single player. If it is time to renegotiate their contract, are they still delivering output at the same level they once were?

We could look at how Mohamed Salah’s previous two campaigns match up, for instance. A more interesting analysis is to contrast the present day Salah with the one that delivered 32 goals and 10 assists in his first Premier League campaign with Liverpool.

Below is the radar comparison. In the red corner, a 31-year-old who suffered his longest injury absence for at least a decade. In blue, the man who delivered the second most non-penalty goal contributions in a 38-game season in the modern era of English football.

Between the end of 2017/18 and the start of last season, Salah added 251 Liverpool games to his tally. Add on his exertions with Egypt and it’s a total of 23,592 minutes, the equivalent of an additional 262 full matches in his legs. Yet his underlying performance barely dipped at all.

The only sizeable fall occurred with his success rate for take-ons, which was inevitable. As far back as 2016, Colin Trainor was writing for Statsbomb that:

“The median winger will have 1.1 successful dribbles when they are 26 years old compared to 1.6 when they are 20 or 21 but their decreased ball carrying does not seem to have an adverse impact on ultimately how creative they are.”

The Salah of 2017/18 was 25 and completing 2.5 take-ons per 90 minutes, and only saw that drop to 2.2 the following season. He was doubling ‘the median winger’ in 2018/19 and wasn’t far adrift of the average 26-year-old in his age 31 season, with 1.0.

The primary FBRef scouting report contains 19 metrics. It details a player’s percentile standing against positional peers from the competition(s) in question.

If you compare the average percentile changes for the player move examples above, the findings are fascinating. Endō’s dropped by 18.6, largely because he wasn’t attacking for the Reds like he had for Stuttgart, while Gravenberch went down by 13.9 thanks to the aforementioned rise in standards.

The trend was not down for everyone. Szoboszlai (1.5) and Mac Allister (4.5) saw their averages rise despite role changes, which augers well. As for Salah, he was matched across campaigns which had five years in-between and his average percentile standing went up by 0.4. Consistency personified.

The Egyptian played at centre-forward in Arne Slot’s first friendly with Liverpool. The make-up of the squad which has flown to the United States for the three-game tour suggests he will likely do so in the matches with Real Betis, Arsenal and Manchester United too.

Dribbling isn’t as important in that role so with everything else largely the same, should Salah play centrally from now on? His radars for 2017/18 and 2023/24 make a compelling case that perhaps he should. At the very least, write him off at your peril.