After nine seasons on Merseyside, Mohamed Salah will leave Liverpool as one of the top three forwards in the history of the Premier League alongside Thierry Henry and Alan Shearer. And he will leave as one of the top three players in the club’s 134-year history alongside Kenny Dalglish and Steven Gerrard.
As disappointing as his final season at in Red has been he is by any measure one of the league’s all time legends as well as one of Liverpool’s best players of all time. Few, perhaps, will know what
that truly means—or what it feels like to start to feel it all slipping away. Gerrard, though, is one of those few.
“I spoke to him around the time and sort of said, don’t do what you’ve done and leave under a cloud,” Gerrard said on The Overlap. “I’m not that close to him but I took the opportunity to say you’ve been here eight, nine years, you’ve been king, you’ve got a legacy. So go on your terms, go the right way.
“He was still I think a little bit emotional from [getting dropped]. He felt like he was in and out of the team at the time and he was upset. So I just thought that it would be a shame if he just left like that, left in January. But I do think that it’s in everyone’s best interests now. I do think that the timing’s right.
“He’s had a disagreement with the manager. I don’t know to what level, but he’s obviously gone and done the interview—which I think he’ll regret further down the line—but that told us there was an issue. Knowing him, he’ll still have himself down as one of the best players in the world and want to show it.”
In the autumn, Salah was benched by head coach Arne Slot. It came just months after the 33-year-old Egyptian forward had carried the Reds to their 20th league title with an all timer of a season, his 47 goals and assists in 2024-25 the most anyone had ever recorded in a38-game Premier League campaign.
It came with the entire team playing poorly and struggling to execute Slot’s tactics—something that has persisted into the new year. It came with other underperforming players seemingly spared the blame by Slot, with Cody Gakpo’s untouchable place on the opposite flank in particular raising eyebrows.
It was, most agreed, wrong for Salah to complain publicly. Yet it was fairly easy to sympathize with someone who had done so much over the years seemingly being singled out as the reason for the club’s 2025-26 problems by a coach with far less credit in the bank who owed Salah a lot for the previous season.
The question now is what Salah’s priorities are. If, as Gerrard expects, he still backs himself to contribute as a top player in a high quality league, taking a pay cut to move to a club in Italy, Spain, or Germany for next season seems his only realistic options. If not, a payday in Saudi or the United States awaits.
