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Farewell to Salah
Farewell to Salah, Liverpool's 'Egyptian king'
Perhaps the fullest realisation of what Mohamed Salah has achieved at Liverpool will only come with time.
But as he prepares to say his goodbyes on Sunday, there is plenty to appreciate and admire in the here and now.
There are the standards Salah helped to set that emanated through the club in his and Liverpool's quest for greatness.
Then there are the records he broke and the trophies his goals brought to Anfield.
Above all, there is the sheer joy he brought and the memories he provided.
"He [Salah] set completely new standards for a professional football player - how hard you can work, how much you can invest in recovery and everything," Jurgen Klopp told BBC Sport in March.
Klopp was the manager when Liverpool signed the Egyptian from Roma in 2017 for £34m.
The deal was questioned because of Salah's previous struggles with Chelsea in the Premier League, but those who scouted him for Liverpool were convinced.
Yet even they - the scouts, Klopp, everyone involved - could not have anticipated how Salah would become an all-time great.
His haul of 257 goals for Liverpool has pushed him past the likes of Sir Kenny Dalglish, Robbie Fowler, Michael Owen and Steven Gerrard. Only Ian Rush (346) and Roger Hunt (285) have scored more.
"Mohamed knew what he had to do to become a Liverpool legend and he took it to a different level," Rush told BBC Sport.
"He couldn't believe how many goals I scored. so he actually said to me: 'Did you count your goals in training?'
So he's got that Scouse sense of humour as well. But it's not just goals; you look at the number of assists and he's a complete footballer.
For the record, there have been 119 assists.
Salah's average of a goal or an assist every 94 minutes for Liverpool is astonishing. That's 376 goal involvements in 35,326 minutes of football.
These are remarkable feats by the man who began his journey in Nagrig, a village in rural Egypt, and became one of the greatest players for one of the world's greatest football clubs.
Salah sat on a throne inside Anfield last year - the club's 'Egyptian king' had committed to extending his reign and marked the occasion in regal style. But now his abdication moment has arrived, a year earlier than planned.
It is not clear for which club or in which country Salah will play next season.
Brentford at home marks the final page in the defining chapter of his footballing life. What a life.
The self-aware Salah appreciates his superstar status, and revels in what he stands for in both the footballing world and the Arabic world.
But he also knows how hard he has worked to reach that status.
No overseas player in the history of the Premier League has scored more goals than Salah's 193 in the competition.
At half-time on his Liverpool debut at Watford, on 12 August 2017, Klopp's message to the new recruit was simply: "Welcome to the Premier League."
Liverpool trailed 2-1 at the interval, but Salah scored in the second half, with Sadio Mane and Roberto Firmino also on the scoresheet that day in a 3-3 draw at Vicarage Road.
What a formidable attacking trio Salah, Firmino and Mane proved to be.
Tuned in to a wavelength seemingly all of their own, they won the lot across five years together and in a manner that gained admirers from across the world.
Only sport has the capacity to combine a trio from Egypt, Senegal and Brazil and deliver such magic. "They scare me, they're dangerous" was the verdict of Pep Guardiola.
By now, it is well documented that Salah and Mane were never the best of friends, but they never stopped talking, with Firmino saying he was the "firefighter" in those moments when it threatened to boil over.
Privately, those at Liverpool during the time, including Firmino, were aware that the competition between Salah and Mane helped them reach their personal pinnacles.
Salah would never have scaled such heights without that sheer single-mindedness and desire to become the best footballer possible.
"A footballer to the absolute core of his being" was the verdict of one club employee.
"Mo is not a big talker, but obviously he's a leader by example. So it's those types of things I'm 100% going to miss," said Liverpool captain Virgil van Dijk.
There is the tale of how after a game where Liverpool beat Watford 5-0, Salah asked Ben Foster which way the goalkeeper would have dived if there had been a penalty.
With such a focus on the marginal details, it was little surprise that players of all ages would look up to him. Put simply, Salah would do things and others would follow.
Those close to Salah speak of an individual who is fun to be around yet aware of the opinions of others. Salah keeps the receipts, as some would say.
Aside from building his formidable physique, one of the biggest changes through his time at Liverpool has been his focus on becoming a more positive person and simply trying to smile more when things have not gone well.
Such a shift came about after Andy Robertson, who joined in the same summer, encouraged Salah to work on his body language.
Yet there was hardly astonishment from those at Liverpool when Salah had his outburst at Leeds in December, when a place on the bench for a third successive game hurt him.
He had started 53 Premier League games in a row before that spell as a substitute, which ultimately signalled the start of the end and the ugly breakdown of his relationship with head coach Arne Slot.
It reached the point where Slot and the Liverpool hierarchy were more than fine with Salah terminating his contract a year early, to leave on a free this summer.
This has undoubtedly been a difficult campaign for so many of the current Liverpool squad, with Slot describing it has toughest season "by a mile".
Like others, Salah was deeply affected by the death of team-mate Diogo Jota in July.
"Until yesterday, I never thought there would be something that would frighten me of going back to Liverpool after the break. Team-mates come and go but not like this," Salah posted last summer.
To watch Salah cry at Anfield in front of the Kop in Liverpool's first game after Jota's death was a reminder that he is as human as the rest of us.
On the football pitch, of course, he did things that were truly out of the ordinary.
At his peak, Salah came as close as anyone to reaching the levels of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo in their prime.
In his debut season at Liverpool, he provided a combined goals and assists tally of 58, averaging one goal involvement every 71 minutes.
Last season, he delivered 57 goal involvements - one every 79 minutes. His consistency and longevity has been staggering.
It was telling to read a recent interview with Rio Ngumoha, where the 17-year-old Liverpool winger revealed how Salah stressed to him that the best players, in addition to skill, always score goals and produce assists.
Simple enough, but it was a reminder that end product is the currency that Salah deals in. No player has more goal involvements (283) for one club in the history of the Premier League.
It would be easy to focus only on the numbers because they are extraordinary.
More than anything, though, it is about the memories.
For Klopp, the standout shared moment is winning the Champions League final against Tottenham in Madrid in 2019, a year after Liverpool had lost to Real Madrid in Kyiv.
That triumph seven years ago delivered the first trophy Klopp and Salah both won at Liverpool.
I recall talking to a Liverpool fan who said he had never watched replays of Salah's second-minute penalty against Tottenham or Divock Origi's late clincher because he didn't want to tarnish the memory of how it all felt inside the ground.
Salah was part of a side that made them feel that way.
There was the goal against Everton that won the FIFA Puskas Award in 2018 and the chip against Manchester City in the Champions League. He stood with his arms stretched wide after that one, taking in the acclaim of the away end.
Then the bullet strike against Chelsea at Anfield, which Klopp jokes would still be travelling if it wasn't for the net, and the breakaway goal against Manchester United in the season when Liverpool won their first Premier League title.
Salah made Old Trafford his playground, scoring more Premier League goals there than any other opposition player.
The list goes on. How about the solo effort against Manchester City at Anfield, when he evaded a sea of blue shirts for one of the great Premier League goals?
Aymeric Laporte, who won five league titles in six years for City, recalls just how tough Salah was to defend against.
"I remember that goal perfectly. I was thinking that he is left-footed so I went to my right side to block the shot with the left, but he cut to the right and even with such a small space of a few centimetres, he scored with his weaker foot," Laporte tells BBC Sport.
Salah was always on fire when he played against us and definitely one of the toughest players I have faced. We always struggled against Liverpool and Pep [Guardiola] and us knew about the capacity he had to score from any situation.
Whether he was celebrating a goal with his shirt off or bowing down in Sujood - the Islamic act of prostration - there are images of Salah that will never be forgotten.
For a generation of Liverpool supporters, he will always be the greatest.
"The legacy speaks for itself - the numbers, the trophies. the way he set a culture and a standard under Klopp," former Reds captain Gerrard told BBC Sport.
Speaking as a fan, we all appreciate what he's done. He's up there with the greats of this club. Mohamed Salah is loved and adored by us all.
It spoke volumes that Trent Alexander-Arnold put Salah alongside Gerrard as "both number one" in his ranking of Liverpool legends.
After Klopp's 2023-24 farewell season, Salah said: "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."
He and Liverpool delivered on the promise.
Salah's 2024-25 season will go down as one of the finest in the history of English football, as he achieved the most goals and assists in the Premier League during that campaign on Liverpool's journey to a 20th title.
Maybe it is timely too that he has struggled in his final season - to highlight the incredible heights he scaled previously.
A return of 13 goals and 10 assists would be solid enough for some, but it is nothing really compared to Salah's previous campaigns.
Yet Salah knows full well that he has already made history and earned legendary status. No late pokes of frustration could affect his long-term legacy.
And so here we are, almost nine years on from Salah's arrival. All good things must come to an end.
A journey which began deep in the Nile Delta in the 1990s has had its most fruitful stop-off in Merseyside, where Salah will get his mosaic on the Kop before the next chapter of his life begins.
"He knows this was the perfect club for him and he was the perfect player for us," said Klopp.
The right player, for the right club, at the right time. That has been Salah all over, and his impact won't be forgotten any time soon.
As Klopp once said: "It's not so important what people think when you come in; it's much more important what they think when you leave."
Source: BBC
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