The Egyptian King
On the departure of Mohamed Salah - and why the one of the last footballers I'll ever truly feel is finally leaving the stage
There is a particular kind of grief that football inflicts on you that nothing else quite replicates. Not the grief of a bad result, or even a season gone wrong. This is the grief of a player who became woven into the fabric of who you are, who existed on that pitch every week as proof that something magical was possible - and who now, suddenly, irrevocably, will not be there anymore. The day you always knew was coming has arrived. Mohamed Salah is leaving Liverpool.
How do you quantify what a footballer means to a club? The instinct is to reach for numbers, and with Salah, the numbers are staggering enough to stop you in your tracks. But the truth is that statistics - however extraordinary, have never been able to hold the full weight of what he has meant. You can recite the records until your voice gives out, and you still won’t have captured the feeling of watching him receive the ball on the right flank, cut inside onto his left foot, and know - know - before the shot had even left his boot, that it was going in.
Some players play for a club. Some players become a club. Salah became Liverpool, and Liverpool - for nearly a decade - became Salah. To separate the two now feels like tearing something that was never meant to come apart.
I - The Record
In Numbers, Impossible
Let us try anyway. Let us stand before the numbers and let them land properly, because they deserve that much.
Since the moment he arrived from Roma in the summer of 2017, Salah has topped the Premier League for goals, assists, open-play chances created, shots, shots on target, and touches in the opposition box. Every single one of those categories - first, for nine years, against the greatest league in the world. He is the Premier League’s all-time leading scorer and creator for a single club, a record he shares with no one. He has scored 50 Champions League goals, making him the first African player to reach that landmark, surpassing Didier Drogba’s previous record by a distance.
And yet, here is what the numbers still cannot tell you: they cannot explain the feeling in the Kop when he got the ball in space. They cannot explain the collective held breath, the lean forward in the seat, the electricity that crackled through Anfield every single time that man had the ball and room to run. Those are things you carry in your body, not your head.
“Since joining in 2017, Mo Salah has scored or assisted 35% of all goals Liverpool have scored in all competitions. He averaged a goal involvement every 94 minutes across 435 appearances.”
II - The Promise
He Promised. He Delivered.
Cast your mind back to the spring of 2024. Liverpool were in transition. Jürgen Klopp had announced he was leaving. The atmosphere was elegiac, uncertain, the kind of mood that descends on a football club when it doesn’t quite know what it’s going to be anymore. And in that moment of doubt, it was Salah - as it so often was … who cut through it all with something clean and true.
His message was simple:
“We know that trophies are what count and we will do everything possible to make that happen next season. Our fans deserve it and we will fight like hell.”
Not a PR line. Not hollow corporate optimism. A promise from a man who had spent eight years making promises on that right flank and keeping every single one of them.
What followed was the greatest individual season the Premier League may have ever witnessed from a player in his 30s. In 2024–25, Salah registered 47 goal involvements; 29 goals and 18 assists - in 38 league games alone. This is a record for a 38-game Premier League season, surpassing Thierry Henry and Erling Haaland. He won the Golden Boot, the Golden Playmaker, and the Player of the Season - the first and only player ever to take all three in a single campaign. He was 32 years old.
And at the end of it, Liverpool were Premier League champions. The title he had promised, delivered. That 5–1 victory over Tottenham that sealed it will live in the memory of every Liverpool supporter for the rest of their lives - and at the heart of it, as ever, was number eleven.
“This is what we wanted to deliver to our fans more than anything. This is a club that should always compete for everything and be right at the top. No excuses. All teams win games but in the end there’s only one champion.”
He didn’t just keep the promise. He made 2024–25 feel like a gift - one last magnificent year where he played as if he had something to prove to every doubter, every critic, every journalist who had spent the previous summer writing his Liverpool obituary. He silenced them all with a season for the ages. In doing so, he also surpassed his own iconic debut in 2017–18, proving that even at 33, he was still finding new ways to evolve.
III - The Evolution
More Than a Goalscorer. A Complete Footballer.
The lazy version of the Mohamed Salah story is purely the goals. The debut season fireworks. The 32 Premier League goals that broke the record in 2017–18. The hat-tricks, the thunderbolts, the penalties dispatched with the cold efficiency of a man utterly at peace with himself in the biggest moments. All of that is real, and all of it is extraordinary.
But the deeper story - the one that elevates him above mere goalscorer into genuinely complete footballer … is the story of his evolution. Because around 2021–22, something shifted. The goals were still there, but increasingly, so was something else. Salah began to see the game differently. He started to create. His assist tallies climbed. His passing range widened. He became a player who could destroy you in multiple dimensions simultaneously, either by scoring himself or by threading a perfectly-timed ball through a defence for someone else to finish.
He drew level with Steven Gerrard’s Premier League assist record for the club — 92 — a fact that still seems almost surreal when you say it out loud. Level with Gerrard. In assists. From a man who arrived as a wide forward and evolved into something approaching a complete attacking midfielder. His 92 Premier League assists for Liverpool equal the most any Red has ever registered in the division’s history.
The phrase we continue to coin to this day … “Only Mohamed Salah” was born.
This evolution was not accidental. It was the hallmark of a player who refused to plateau, refused to become a greatest-hits act, refused to coast. Even as age crept in, even as the questions about his longevity grew louder, he kept rewriting what was possible. The willingness to reinvent himself - repeatedly, genuinely, not as a PR exercise but as a matter of personal pride, is one of the purest expressions of what a professional footballer should be.
IV - The Impact
He Turned Our Dreams … Into Reality
There is a sentence that every Liverpool fan of a certain age carries with them quietly, rarely spoken aloud because speaking it aloud makes it too real, too fragile. It goes something like this: for the majority of my life, Liverpool were not the club I was promised they would be.
The people around my age reading this will know exactly what I mean. You came of age as a Liverpool supporter in the long shadow of the 1990s and 2000s: the countless near-misses, the heartbreaks, the years of watching other clubs lift the trophies that should have been yours. And then Jürgen Klopp arrived, Sadio Mane arrived, and then Mohamed Salah arrived … and something changed so dramatically and so completely that it still feels, some mornings, like it might not quite have been real.
But it was. A Champions League. Two Premier League titles. Cup doubles. Years of football played at a level of intensity and beauty that reminded you why you fell in love with the sport in the first place. Salah was the engine of all of it. He was the player who made the dreams of a generation of Liverpool supporters not merely imaginable, but actual.
We watched him score 16 goals against Manchester United. We watched him score after 55 seconds in Europe. We watched him score the fastest hat-trick in Champions League history. We watched him cut in from the right, as he did a thousand times, curl the ball into the top corner, as he did a hundred times, and we lost our minds with joy, as we did every single time, because even when you knew it was coming, it never got old.
“I never imagined how deeply this club, this city, these people would become part of my life. Liverpool is not just a football club. It’s a passion, it’s a history, it’s a spirit I can’t explain in words to anyone not part of this club.”
V - The Last One
The Last Footballer … I Truly Felt
I want to say something now that is harder to articulate, but which feels more important than any of the statistics. And it is this: Mohamed Salah is one of the the last footballers I may ever truly, completely, unreservedly feel.
At 34 years of age, I am aware of a shift that has happened gradually, almost imperceptibly, in how I relate to footballers. The younger ones - the teenagers who arrive with their data profiles and their social media brands and their agents on speed dial … I can appreciate them intellectually, I can admire their talent, but I cannot feel them the way I feel with a Virgil … a Firmino … a Salah. The emotional contract is different. The generation gap has finally opened up between me and the players I watch.
Salah was the last one who arrived and stayed long enough to become part of my adult life. Not just my Weekends and CL nights - my life. He was there when I was 26, and now I am 34. He was there through the years when everything felt possible, and through the years when nothing quite came together, and through the year he kept his promise and brought the title home. He was there, every week, number eleven, doing something that made you remember why the whole beautiful, maddening, occasionally heartbreaking exercise of loving a football club was worth it.
For me, in a Liverpool shirt, only one name rivals his. Only Steven Gerrard - our Gerrard, the boy from Huyton who became the soul of everything we were - sits alongside him.
That is the company Salah keeps. That is the conversation he belongs in.
Not as a foreign superstar who passed through. As a Liverpool legend, full stop, whose name will be spoken in the same breath as the greatest this club has ever produced.
“In my lifetime, only Steven Gerrard rivals Mohamed Salah as Liverpool’s greatest footballer. That is the measure of what he has meant. That is the standard to which he has risen. Both of them: irreplaceable, eternal, ours.” - The only honest conclusion
The 2025–26 season has not been a vintage one. There have been public tensions, a difficult relationship with Arne Slot, weeks on the bench, the kind of messy, complicated ending that rarely matches the grandeur of everything that came before. But here is what I know about endings: they do not define legacies. And Mohamed Salah’s legacy at Liverpool is beyond the reach of one difficult season. It is cemented in nine years of brilliance, in two titles, in a Champions League, in a record that may stand for decades, and in the permanent, indelible memory of a man who turned up and delivered - again, and again, and again.
He will play his remaining games. He will bid his farewell at Anfield. And when that day comes, Anfield will give him the send-off he deserves - the kind that shakes the rafters, that spills out onto the streets, that travels across the city and the country and reaches wherever Egyptian ears are tuned in. Because that is what he has earned.
Thanks for all the memories Mo … You’ll Never Walk Alone.