There is perhaps nothing in a career as hard as the leaving of it. Unless something utterly remarkable happens, Mohamed Salah has played his last game for Liverpool. Left out of the starting lineup for each of the last three matches, he trained on Monday after his extraordinary post-match tirade following the 3-3 draw with Leeds but he has not been selected for the Champions League against Inter on Tuesday. He may or may not be with the team for Saturday’s game at Anfield against Brighton (“I don’t know if I am going to play or not but I am going to enjoy it,” he said). After that, he will be in Morocco for the Africa Cup of Nations with the Egypt national team and the transfer window will have opened by the time the tournament is over.
How has it come to this? Salah is one of Liverpool’s all-time greats. He lies behind only Ian Rush and Roger Hunt in their all-time goalscoring charts. Across all clubs, only Alan Shearer, Harry Kane and Wayne Rooney have scored more Premier League goals. He played a key role in two Premier League titles and a Champions League. He’s won the Premier League Golden Boot four times and been named player of the year three times by both his fellow players and soccer writers – including last year. He’s only 33 and there has been no obvious sign yet of him fading with age. This is not the end anybody would have wanted.
As Liverpool strode away from the pack to win the title last season, there was a background grumble: Salah, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Virgil van Dijk were all out of contract in the summer. Alexander-Arnold went; the other two stayed. None, it’s fair to say, have especially enjoyed what followed. Van Dijk suddenly looks ordinary, his aura diminished. Alexander-Arnold has started only five league games for Real Madrid and has not looked comfortable. And Salah has seemed distant and disconnected. He’s scored only three non-penalty league goals and, worse, has shown no signs of forming an on-field relationship with the other forwards Liverpool have brought in, while being in part responsible for the problems down the right flank given his inability or unwillingness to track.
It’s a reminder, perhaps, that a huge part of how good a player looks is the system they’re playing in. Salah, Alexander-Arnold and Jordan Henderson worked as an almost perfect three on Liverpool’s right. Alexander-Arnold could release Salah with his quick accurate passes, which forced opposing left-backs to stay deeper, lessening the defensive burden on Alexander-Arnold, who could drift into a playing-making role in midfield, while Henderson had the stamina and tactical intelligence to offer cover. Last season Dominik Szoboszlai, while obviously a very different player than Henderson, was able to fulfill a similar role in terms of his energy and tracking.
But that coherence has been shattered this season. The attempt to switch to 4-2-3-1 has demanded more defensive work on the right and Salah has been unable to provide that. He has seemed at times resentful of the changes, at one point posting on X: “How about we celebrate the great signings without disrespecting the PL champions?” in response to a Liverpool fan account celebrating the “upgrade” from Darwin Núñez and Luis Díaz to Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz. It’s not just about manager Arne Slot’s attempts to transition to a new style. The impact of the death of Diogo Jota cannot be overlooked; Salah stayed back on the pitch after the opening game of the season, wiping away the tears with his cuff as the Kop sang their tribute.
Whatever the reason, Salah has not played well this season and in that regard his reaction to being dropped is troubling. Does he feel time sapping at him? The degree of paranoia seemed striking: insisting an unnamed person at the club is trying to force him out, naming Jamie Carragher, and claiming he is treated more harshly than Kane, supposedly remembering a time the former Tottenham striker went “10 games” without scoring. Since 2015-16, his first full season as a first-choice striker, Kane’s longest drought is six games but, besides, Kane played for Tottenham, not for a side that has just spent £400m on forwards. The criticism Kane has received most frequently is for dropping deep too often; nobody ever doubted his work-rate.
Nobody comes out of this well. It’s not the first time Slot’s man-management has been questioned. Salah’s response, his insistence on blaming others, feels entitled. But the club must be questioned as well. The summer signings appear to have been designed for a post-Salah world, but if that is true, why offer him the new contract? For a club that has recently prided itself on its use of data, it feels a strangely sentimental decision.
Perhaps releasing Salah, especially on a free, would have been too much disruption this past summer. There is already a sense that Liverpool have tried to change too much too quickly. And why did they end up with three key players reaching the end of their deals simultaneously? But keeping Salah while preparing for a future without him has led only to bitterness and recrimination.
This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com, and he’ll answer the best in a future edition.
