Mo Salah continues to prove why he might be the best Reds attacker the Premier League has ever witnessed, despite concerns this season may be the Egyptian’s last at Anfield
For someone who was tipped to be a one-season wonder, Mohamed Salah is making a decent career for himself to say the very least. The Liverpool attacker came back to the Premier League with a point to prove seven years ago and has certainly surpassed that.
A lot of the focus around the 32-year-old right now comes down to what will happen next, given he is out of contract at the end of the season with no new deal hinted at just yet. But pretty much every week – whilst proving exactly why he is deserving of a new deal – Salah is also providing that much-needed distraction from any such fears.
For the 2024/25 campaign, he already has nine goals in 16 appearances – seven of those in the Premier League plus one each in the Champions League and Carabao Cup. Even when he is not scoring, his creative efforts have flourished over the years to the point where he now has as many assists as he does goals this term, having added another couple in Tuesday’s 4-0 rout of Bayer Leverkusen.
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The tribalistic nature of football will probably prevent Salah from ever being crowned as the best attacker of the Premier League era amongst all supporters, even though statistics would prove those same people wrong.
He now sits eighth in the all-time top scorers list – the only active English top-flight player in the top 10 with 164 goals in total. He may have the ability to catch those still ahead of him, even beyond the end of the current term, though that 260-record total by Alan Shearer is still a way off.
As for assists, 74 to his name means he currently sits joint-13th with Thierry Henry on that all-time list. At his current pace, a spot within that top 10 is also well within the realms of possibility.
Combining the two into total goal contributions in the Premier League era, his total stands at 238 – which is enough for eighth in this ranking too.
The Reds have had a number of goalscoring greats throughout those last 32 years of the Premier League era, but is Salah now truly the greatest of them?
It started out with the heir to Ian Rush, Robbie Fowler. It was only until last Saturday that ‘God’ occupied eighth in the Premier League goal records, when Salah finally leapfrogged him to become the Reds’ highest entry on that chart. Fowler will now have to settle for second.
The conveyor belt of talent then produced Michael Owen. The only Liverpool player ever to win the Ballon d’Or, the world was at Owen’s feet until he departed Anfield for Real Madrid, ending his time there with 150 top-flight goals – enough for 11th on the list. His career was never the same in Spain, nor Newcastle, and certainly not at Manchester United.
His exit was the beginning of a short period without that talismanic individual, but again more would rise. The next was Fernando Torres. They bought the lad from sunny Spain, as the chant goes, and while his 65 goals across three-and-a-half years did not bring about the title victory they so deserved, his partnership with Steven Gerrard is still lauded around this part of the world.
Again, it was a spell that ended with transfer heartbreak when he betrayed his club for rivals Chelsea. Perhaps the most heartbreaking aspect of that deal was that Torres never actually got to play with the man who would turn out to be his successor, Luis Suarez – and some replacement he was.
Amidst the unneeded controversy was brilliance few had witnessed before. Gerrard had once again found someone who could do his passes justice, and had Suarez not been banned for the first six matches of the 2013/14 campaign, he would have likely posted numbers akin to the record seasonal goals total of 36, later set by Manchester City’s Erling Haaland in 2023.
It wasn’t to be though, and the Uruguayan would transfer to Barcelona. The footballing world will now remember him more for his time in Spain as a serial La Liga winner, a Champions League winner and as one of the famous Lionel Messi, Suarez and Neymar – MSN – trio.
Eventually, Liverpool would respond with their own three attackers, one of which was Salah. The others, Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mane, will be fondly remembered in modern folklore for many years having brought the league title and a sixth Champions League to Liverpool.
‘Bobby’ Firmino revolutionised the centre forward’s position, with his 50 assists counting just as much as his 82 strikes, whilst Mane’s 90 goals in Red as a left-winger make him one of the deadliest to ever play the position.
But which forward takes the crown of Liverpool’s best of the modern era? Have your say in the poll above, and don’t forget to justify your answer in the comments.
