It’s strange to write words in the wake of Mohamed Salah and the club announcing a parting of ways, largely because even if the announcement itself isn’t perhaps a massive surprise, the enormity very much is.
It’s easy even within our own fandom to underrate Mo Salah not because we don’t appreciate his output but because he has, since arriving, made the extraordinary look absolutely normal. We got to spend so many years reveling in articles that had to be clarified that “only Salah” had better numbers
than the subject.
It’s hard to truly appreciate something when it happens in front of you every week — and I don’t mean to sell us short. We love Mohamed Salah, we gave him merch and murals and songs and have him framed in our homes. Some have had Mohamed Salah tattoos for quite some time. He is very much loved, and yet you at once feel we’ll most appreciate him once nostalgia hits. There is no guarantee that we’ll ever see anything anywhere close to this player we’ve had for so long, and that is perhaps what makes his legacy so special.
Of course it is a gift to have seen a player like this in a team that actually achieves something. What Mohamed Salah’s Liverpool has done over his career is fundamentally unbelievable, and it’s truly unfortunate that Salah played against a team in light blue who were able on a couple of occasions to get a point more than our lads were. When we’re remembering players’ legacies I do think trophies are important, but in my immediate response to the news of Salah’s departure is a central thought: that I am most grateful for the journeys he has taken us on, including the losing ones.
His statistics have dominated every league he’s been in over his career at Liverpool, and it has felt like that. The show we’ve had in front of us has been something so special, and it’s very much something that the vast majority of football fans never get in their lifetimes. Mohamed Salah is singular, and we are ever so lucky that it was Liverpool who saw that he could be, and ever more so lucky that everything fell into place to allow him to prove it for so long. And that he forced the team into his image.
In later days and later years I will have much more to say about what Mohamed Salah means to me as a player and what the Salah Era meant to Liverpool Football Club. But for now I hope he feels the outpouring of love and gratefulness — and I hope it never stops.
