Mohamed Salah: Liverpool’s unbreakable, unstoppable goalscoring ‘machine’ deserves to be considered the best player in Premier League history

As soon as Brentford lost the ball in midfield, manager Thomas Frank knew what was coming. “A signature Liverpool counter-attack”, as he put it. And the outcome is nearly always the same. “Into Salah, bang, goal!” And he wasn’t wrong.

After taking a pass from Darwin Nunez in his stride, Mohamed Salah calmly passed the ball into the back of the net to put Liverpool 1-0 up six minutes before the break in a game that had been evenly balanced until that point.

Salah scored again as Liverpool eventually ran out easy winners, but Jurgen Klopp paid Frank quite the compliment in his post-match press conference. “More than 20 years ago, when I started my [coaching] career, I wanted to create a team that nobody wanted to play against,” the German told reporters at Anfield. “We faced that team today.”

However, when it was Frank’s turn to speak to the media, he felt the spotlight should shine not on the Bees, but the man who had effectively proved the difference between the two sides. “Mo Salah…” the Dane began, with an unmistakable mix of awe and resignation in his voice. “Klopp is praising me a lot but I don’t know if Salah gets enough praise. I think he is potentially the best player in the Premier League.

“In terms of goals and assists, what a level! He must be one of the best offensive players in the world – and not like top 10 – but top three. So, when you have a player of that quality, you just know you are going to have problems. Even on the first goal, it’s not every player that scores in that situation, so that just shows his qualities.”

Salah’s clinical finish was unsurprising, of course. Klopp had pointed out himself that as soon as the ball arrived at Salah’s feet inside the Brentford box, “there was no doubt” as to what would happen next. Because there is a sense of inevitability about the Egyptian getting on the scoresheet for Liverpool, so much so, in fact, that his weekly heroics are often taken for granted.

Salah has made the remarkable routine – which is why Frank is 100 percent correct when he says that the forward often doesn’t get the credit he deserves.

A history of Ballon d’Or snubs

Salah, remember, didn’t even make the top 10 in this year’s Ballon d’Or vote. Granted, one could argue that he was an inevitable victim of Liverpool’s dismal 2022-23 campaign, as well as Egypt’s failure to qualify for the World Cup, but it is an individual award at the end of the day and it takes a special kind of player to shine in a struggling side – which is exactly what Salah did. Indeed, only Erling Haaland (61) and Kylian Mbappe (50) were directly involved in more goals in all competitions across Europe’s ‘Big Five’ leagues last season than Salah (46).

But then, Salah’s continuous class has never been fully recognised by Ballon d’Or voters. For example, he finished seventh in 2021, at a time when he was averaging a goal a game in the Premier League and scoring stunning solo strikes against the likes of Manchester City. When asked about his ranking, Salah smiled and said “No comment”, while Klopp simply stated that “Mo definitely should have been higher up.”

Alan Shearer, though, was furious: “Week-in week-out, year-in year-out, Salah performs magic. How he came seventh is anybody’s guess. Salah is the best in the world right now. The best goalscorer and the best player, full stop.”

‘A machine’

It is that consistency that certainly sets him apart. When Klopp says Salah is “a goalscoring machine”, he’s not wrong. The man just never stops delivering the goods – partly because he never breaks down.

In his seven full seasons since joining Liverpool from Roma for an initial £36.5 million ($46m) – the best bit of business in the club’s history – Salah has never played fewer than 48 games. He’s sat out just three Premier League fixtures through either injury or illness, which is just staggering – and testament to his amazing professionalism.

Even among a group of players that are renowned for their work ethic and stamina, Salah stands out, according to club captain Virgil van Dijk, while Liverpool’s head of fitness and conditioning, Andreas Kornmayer, says that if you tell Salah to turn up 30 minutes before training, he’ll arrive an hour early.

Assistant manager Pep Lijnders is not sure if he ever goes home. “Mo’s car is always in the car park!” the Dutchman told the club’s official website last year. “Sometimes I think he does it on purpose!”

Whatever the truth, Klopp’s other assistance, Peter Krawietz, says the fact that Salah is nearly always available for selection makes him invaluable. “I think that is the best thing you can be as a player,” he told liverpoolfc.com. “He wants to be as fit as possible every day because he wants to be available for us, to achieve the next team objectives and to get goals and win the Golden Boot – all these things.”

The results of Salah’s astounding dedication to his craft speak for themselves. After his goal against Palace in Saturday’s comeback win at Selhurst Park, he now has 200 goals in just 327 appearances for Liverpool, as well as 150 Premier League goals in his career.

He is the club’s all-time Premier League top scorer, while he has also struck more times in European competitions for the Reds than any other player in history. And what’s really crazy is the speed at which the winger has broken these records. Salah (0.61) actually has a better goals-per-game ratio than Liverpool’s top two goalscorers, Ian Rush (0.52) and Roger Hunt (0.58) – both of whom were classic No.9s.

As Jamie Carragher once said on Sky Sports, “His numbers are off the scale, in terms of goals and assists – higher than any other Liverpool player in history.”

‘Liverpool’s greatest Premier League player’

Where exactly Salah ranks in the pantheon of Liverpool legends is hard to say, but he’s probably not yet done enough to dethrone King Kenny Dalglish, who won six league titles and three European Cups during his playing days on Merseyside.

However, it’s difficult to argue against him being classed as the club’s finest of the Premier League era. Steven Gerrard is obviously an Anfield icon, a homegrown hero whose completeness as a midfielder and greatness as a captain was best summed up by his Herculean performance in the 2005 Champions League final.

As even Manchester United legend Paul Scholes has since admitted, while Gerrard would have undoubtedly flourished at Old Trafford, he’s not sure that he would have been able to carry Liverpool in the same way his fellow England midfielder did for so many years. One can only imagine how many more trophies Gerrard might have lifted had he got the chance to play under a manager like Klopp for all of his Anfield career.

Gerrard, though, never got his hands on the Premier League, and while one untimely slip is often portrayed as the sole reason for that sad fact, the truth is that he was far too often let down by mediocre managers and sub-standard signings during his peak years. Consequently, Gerrard was never quite able to achieve the same level of consistency as Salah.

“You’d have to say Salah is Liverpool’s best-ever Premier League player simply due to his stats,” former Reds winger Jermaine Pennant recently argued. “We understand what Steven Gerrard did for Liverpool, but if you’re looking at goals, assists, and overall numbers, Salah has been phenomenal and has broken all kinds of records.”

The best of the best?

Salah, though, can’t just lay claim to the title of Liverpool’s best player in the Premier League. We’ve now reached a point where a case can be made for him to be considered the greatest attacking talent the competition has ever seen.

“He’s definitely one of the best goalscorers the Premier League has ever seen – I rate him that highly,” former United defender Rio Ferdinand confessed. “I think he’s a fantastic player and got that self-belief which separates him from the normal players.

“The consistency that he’s played at such a high level puts him in that elite bar of players that we’ve seen in the Premier League.” There’s absolutely no disputing that claim. But Salah isn’t just a goalscorer. “People often forget how many goals he also sets up,” Klopp argues. And he’s dead right.

Since arriving at Anfield, Salah has been directly involved in more goals than any other player (209) – and it’s not even close, with Harry Kane a distant second, with 169. Shearer, Andy Cole, Sergio Aguero, Ian Wright, Didier Drogba and Wayne Rooney – all prolific Premier League players and undeniably capable of fashioning openings for others, but not one of them was as adept at both scoring and creating goals as Salah, who ranks second for assists (62), fourth for chances created (402) and fifth for dribbles completed (360) since the start of the 2017-18 Premier League season.

Salah vs Henry

What we’re talking about here is a rare hybrid attacker, a world-class winger with the predatory instincts of a classic No.9. In that context, Salah really only has two possible rivals: Cristiano Ronaldo and Thierry Henry.

Had the former spent more of his peak at Manchester United, the Portuguese phenom would probably have matched Salah’s sustained excellence in England, but as it was, Ronaldo left Old Trafford a year after his most prolific campaign.

Henry, by contrast, gave his best years to Arsenal. In total, he spent eight sensational seasons in north London, where he was converted into the world’s most devastating attacking force by Arsene Wenger, meaning there are obvious parallels with the way in which Klopp added goals – and plenty of them – to Salah’s game.

The difference, of course, is that Salah has continued to operate predominantly out wide, whereas Henry played mostly through the middle, but they have much in common. Henry even had his own issues with the Ballon d’Or.

Arsenal’s all-time record goalscorer was a thrilling talent, as elegant as he was effective, both a beauty and a beast, who could tear teams to shreds single-handedly but he was also unselfish – as underlined by the fact that he remains the only player in Premier League history to rack up 20-plus goals and 20-plus assists in the same season (2002-03). So, exactly why the Ballon d’Or went to Pavel Nedved that year remains a mystery…

Of course, Henry never managed to win the Champions League while plying his trade in England either – unlike Salah, who was on target in Liverpool’s 2019 final win over Tottenham – but the Frenchman did claim two Premier League titles, as well as four Golden Boots, putting him one ahead of the Liverpool man on both counts.

Don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone

And yet with the seemingly indestructible Salah still at the top of his game at 31 years of age, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that he equals – or even surpasses – Henry’s achievements. Much will depend on whether Salah decides to move to Saudi Arabia at the end of the season.

But, truth be told, it’s not as if his legacy would be harmed by leaving next summer. On the contrary, it might actually be for the best because, maybe, just maybe, he’d finally get the credit he deserves.

As Van Dijk once said, “At a later stage, I think the things he’s done will be appreciated a lot more by the outside world. For us, we appreciate everything he does day in, day out. We see all the hard work that he puts in. He just has to keep it going.”

And he has. There has been no let-up and no signs of him slowing down. More than seven years after his arrival at Anfield, the sequence remains the same: Into Salah, bang, goal! Painfully predictable for opponents – and yet still utterly unstoppable.