HOT TAKE ALERT: Why Liverpool Should Re-Sign Mohamed Salah

Sorry for the month-long delay. I moved across the country; need to furnish a house; have to adjust to the lack of sunlight, the presence of snow; hit a deer with my car; did Thanksgiving; and etc.

I’m planning on sending these out regularly again, provided you find them useful. So, if they’re useful, let me know!

All right — yesterday, I wrote about arguably the best player in the world right now and how he is inarguably out of contract at the end of the season:

Through 14 Premier League games, the 32-year-old Egypt star is averaging 1.25 non-penalty goals+assists per 90 minutes. Across the database from the site FBref, which has different cut-offs for each league, there have been 13 different instances in Europe's Big Five leagues where a player who was at least 32 years old at the start of the season played at least 2,000 league minutes and averaged at least 0.9 non-penalty goals+assists per 90.

Here's the list:

- Zlatan Ibrahimovic, 33 years old for PSG in 2015-16: 1.7 npG+A/90
- Lionel Messi, 32, Barcelona, 2019-20: 1.3
- Lionel Messi, 33, Barcelona, 2020-21: 1.1
- Karim Benzema, 33, Real Madrid, 2021-22: 1.1
- Cristiano Ronaldo, 32, Real Madrid, 2017-18: 1.1
- Robert Lewandowski, 32, Bayern Munich, 2021-22: 1.0
- Karim Benzema, 32, Real Madrid, 2020-21: 1.0
- Lionel Messi, 35, PSG, 2022-23: 1.0
- Roberto Baggio, 36, Brescia, 2003-04: 1.0
- Antonio Di Natale, 32, Udinese, 2010-11: 0.9
- Robert Lewandowski, 33, Bayern Munich, 2022-23: 0.9
- Claudio Pizarro, 32, Werder Bremen, 2011-12: 0.9
- Teddy Sheringham, 34, Manchester United, 2000-01: 0.9

The following season, the players who remained in the Big Five leagues averaged 0.87 goals+assists per 90 minutes and averaged 2,388 minutes of domestic-league gametime. That's still, on average, elite attacking production and 26.5 full-90s worth of matches. So while we would expect most players at these ages to decline, these players do decline a little bit, though they're coming from such a high level that their production is still well ahead of most other players in the world.

I’m not going to list off everything else I’ve written about over the past month, but here’s what I did last week:

• I continued with the impossible task of ranking the top 50 players in the Premier League.

• I tried to identify the most “clutch” players in the Premier League but also tried to figure out what “clutch” even means in a sport with so few goals and even fewer goal-scorers.

Also, Fangraphs projects Juan Soto to still be an above-average baseball player when I turn 50. That is cool. That is very cool.