Next up, a request from Ahmer: “I would love an essay on my favorite player Mohamed Salah.” Here is an essay on Ahmer’s favorite player, Mohamed Salah.
The summer of 2017 was the summer of Neymar shattering everything you thought you knew about the economics of soccer. Not only did Paris Saint-Germain more than double the previous transfer record to acquire the Brazilian superstar; they took him, smack dab in the middle of his prime, right out from under Barcelona. The biggest club in the world had become a stepping stone for a team they’d just punked in the Champions League, a team that was less than a decade removed from a bottom-half finish in Ligue 1.
Nearly three years later, nothing has changed. The financial implications from the coronavirus are inextricable from the public-health implications, and the grave unpredictability of the latter makes the former even more so. Amidst a contracting global economy, transfer fees, though, seem bound to plummet. Per a study by the analyst Laurie Shaw, Transfermarkt’s estimated player values have slumped by 20 percent for players born before 1998, and 10 percent for those born after Michael Jordan’s second retirement. The Neymar deal also encouraged even more accounting sleight of hand on clubs’ magical balance sheets; if your Neymar goes for 200 million, then my asset, Eden Hazard, should be worth just as much! Not anymore.
PSG bought Neymar so the club could win the Champions League. So far, he’s played in three knockout games for the club in three seasons. Mohamed Salah, meanwhile, more than doubled that total in his first season. Since joining Liverpool in that same crazy summer, he’s appeared in 14 knockout-round matches and two Champions League finals. Most famously, he scored the winning goal in last year’s final. Outside of Lionel Messi, he’s been as impactful of a player as anyone on the planet since arriving at Anfield: Premier League Player of the Year in his first season, a CL title last year, and -- whatever happens with the rest of this season -- the best 29-game run in PL history this year.
Salah was the same age as Neymar in the summer of 2017, and yet you could’ve had five Salahs for the price of one Neymar back then. But it wasn’t just Neymar; 12 other players went for more than Mo. Per Transfermarkt:
It’s laughable now — Matic! Morata! Gylfi Sigurdsson? — and it was still funny back then, too. StatsBomb’s Head of Analysis (and recent Infinite Football podcast guest) wrote a piece titled, “Mohamed Salah: Signing of the Summer?”. As James wrote, “You want a creative goalscorer entering his prime years? Salah ticks all the boxes.” More from James:
Liverpool are acquiring prime talent who at 25 years old is likely to spend his best years with them. Salah’s profile appears so solid at this point that nearly any club in Europe could realistically enhance their squad by acquiring him. There is talk that Roma need to sell to balance their financial considerations, and if that’s the case, then Liverpool have stolen a march by stepping in and getting the deal done.
For all the supposed mysteries of scouting and chemistry and playing styles and translatability from league to league, sometimes it’s just simple. Per Stats Perform, here’s a chart of expected goals and expected assists per 90 minutes among all non-striker attackers with at least 1,400 minutes of game time during Salah’s final season with Roma.
You’ll see Messi off on his own -- absolutely dominant in both areas. Then there’s Cristiano Ronaldo, getting off shots like no one else, while assisting chances at an average rate. And then, among the mortals, there’s Salah, in that red shirt, green background, way above the baselines in both areas. If you add up xG and xA, only Messi (1.24), Ronaldo (1.04), and Neymar (0.82) were more productive than Salah (0.81). You can kind of see Neymar in the graph, getting blotted out by a smiling Salah.
There are reasons why the Egyptian didn’t go for more, but none of ‘em really stand up to any legit scrutiny. He’d washed out of Chelsea, so perhaps teams were wary of his ability to hang at the top-level in England, but that always felt more like newspaper-column group-think rather than any kind of legit analysis, especially after stars like Romelu Lukaku and Kevin De Bruyne also got the boot from Stamford Bridge. The other theoretical concern, as James pointed out three years ago, was that Salah wasn’t the primary goal-scorer at Roma -- that would be ageless, languid king, Edin Dzeko. Maybe he’d struggle without a target man?
Nope, Salah just became Liverpool’s attacking fulcrum right from the jump. While he took about 16 percent of the team’s shots while he was on the field at Roma, my man has leapt up to 28, 25, and 24 percent, in order, during his three years with LFC. The first season was absurd, one of the few Messi-like seasons England has ever seen, as Salah generated more attacking production -- non-penalty goals and assists -- than any player in league history other than Luis Suarez. That was driven mainly by some lightning-in-a-bottle finishing and a big increase in shots: 3.42 per 90, compared with 2.32 in his final Roma year. He was great in Italy, but this was something else.
“If anything, the overarching comment for Salah applies to all their front three [including Sadio Mane and Roberto Firmino],” James told me. “They all looked like good signings, but nobody could have predicted that they all hit the top end of their potential. Nobody thinks the three of them are anything less than world class now, and that they all have hit that is something of a surprise.”
In the two seasons since Salah’s debut, the shot volume has remained, while the quality of the attempts has declined, putting him somewhere in the realm of “not Messi, merely great”. In other words, he’s right where he was at Roma: 0.82 and 0.84 xG+xA per 90 over the past two seasons.
He’s shooting more and creating a little less, but the endpoint has been roughly the same. The biggest change from Roma to Liverpool is, frankly, that he’s also become more of a facilitator and a target man, and he’s done both at the same time. His dribbling rate has increased by about 50 percent, and he’s getting on the ball way more often in the box: 6.6 touches per 90 in 16-17, never below 8.7 since and up to 10 this year. In other words, Salah was an elite second option with Roma, and in a Liverpool team without a true central focal-point, he’s become the bell cow back, combining those trademark jittery runs from the right with fire-hydrant-like solidity in traffic.
But most of those numbers might be unnecessary. Here’s all you really need to know: Over the past three years, Liverpool have become one of the best two or three soccer teams on the planet. And over the past three years, not a single attacking player (in the Big Five leagues) has played more minutes than Mohamed Salah. Neymar just needs 64 more hours of game time before he catches him.