The world turns, the sun rises and sets, time passes. Nothing is a constant, not ever. The borders of the country you will live your life in bear little resemblance to the ones your great-grandparents lived through and they will not be the ones your great-grandchildren experience.
For many, the timelines of change where they were born will be shorter. Open up a map from the year you were born and look for what has been altered while you were busy looking elsewhere. Did Germany and all of Eastern Europe
have a line through it? Did Rhodesia or North Yemen exist? Had Spain departed Western Sahara, leaving Mauritania and Morocco to decide the fates of the people who lived there? What of the lines demarcating the Balkans or Kashmir or the island of New Guinea?
The technologies you rely on, the foods that you eat, the language that you use. From within the lived human experience, all of these can feel deceptively constant, the incremental nature of so much of change allowing many of us to feel as though we exist within set, safe, stable lives. Even if we really don’t. Up until the moment we don’t. There’s no way to talk about any of this without sounding horribly self-indulgent.
As Liverpool fans, we were there for Mohamed Salah, and we knew that he would always exist.
As Liverpool fans, we have been there before. We were there for Steven Gerrard. We were there for Kenny Dalglish and Ian Rush. We were there for Roger Hunt and Ian Callaghan. We were there, and we knew that they would always exist. Until, in a moment, they didn’t. Not on the pitch any more. Not doing the things we knew them for. The things we took for granted that they could do. Time had passed, almost unnoticed, all while we convinced ourselves that things could always be this way.
In some ways, even the departure of Jürgen Klopp didn’t feel quite this monumental. In part perhaps it was because of how natural the transition at the time felt to Arne Slot. But also maybe in part because it felt like some of the old Liverpool was still there, because no one represented the old Liverpool like Mohamed Salah.
Klopp was gone but at lest Salah was still there, and he wasn’t simply there. Because Klopp was gone and Salah turned right around and put in maybe the season of his career, strapping the entire team to his back and carrying Liverpool to last season’s Premier League title. He scored 29 goals and 18 assists. His 47 goal involvements was a record in a 38-game season. There was arguably no better player in the world of football. There was inarguably no more important player to his side’s success.
It may have been the greatest individual season in the history of the Premier League. It may even have been the greatest individual season in the history of Liverpool football club. And we were there for it.
And now it’s over and in the ending of something that for a time felt eternal we are reminded, again, that even while we had all been watching Salah be the best player in the world every week usually twice a week for more than eight years, the world hasn’t stopped. It never does. Jürgen Klopp is, in fact, gone. Bobby Firmino is gone and Sadio Mané is gone. Gini Wijnaldum is gone and Fabinho is gone and Jordan Henderson is gone and Joël Matip is gone and Trent Alexander-Arnold is gone and Andy Robertson is going and will even both of Alisson Becker and Virgil van Dijk still be there next season?
We are all richer, all of us in our own little worlds and latched onto this shared experience with people both local to the club and scattered all across the globe, for having been able to witness what they did.
We are all now poorer for knowing for absolute certain and in a way that can feel crushingly final that we will never see it again, that the end has now truly arrived and all that is left are the memories. Some things feel as though they could last forever. Right up until the moment they end. It all sounds very self-indulgent and more than a little hyperbolic.
When you stare up at the infinite blackness of three in the morning and your body feels like caving in on itself from the anxiety of grappling with the world and suddenly a constant is gone and you look around and everything else is uncertainty. It isn’t actually about Salah, never really was. It isn’t ever any one athlete or any of the other diffuse shared experiences human beings latch onto for comfort. Isn’t any actor or shared universe or career or politician or work project.
We all, though, do tend to seek out and then pour ourselves into our constructed constants. We find our foundational support structures. Foundational distraction structures. For when life simply gets to be too much for us. For when the uncertainty of what seems to be a decaying, devolving world we have no choice but to exist in overtakes us. And then those constants end and you step back from it and take it all in, as if with new eyes. The way everything else has changed while you were focused in on something so small and silly and good.
All of the time you spent focused on a distraction while everything else was falling apart, a world of eight billion people being ripped apart by the stupidity and greed and and petty grievances of a powerful few whose lives are so privileged that they have never had to face the slightest of consequences for their stupidity and greed and their unshakeable belief that their petty grievances matter more than the lives and livelihoods and basic comforts of eight billion others. There is a world that may not be perfect but that doesn’t have to be quite so bad, and it’s increasingly hard to see a path to that world from the one in which we do live.
While you were busy watching Mohamed Salah be eternal for the better part of a decade, the rest of the world changed, and so much of it for the worse. For as bad as things might have been in many places in 2017 when he signed from Roma, the world today doesn’t look like it did then. And it’s hard to find many examples of it getting better over that time. Anywhere. Outside of the palaces and superyachts of the richest few.
Over the past decade, a conflict that simmered and stretched from seeds planted before the Cold War even ended turned into an open war of choice in 2022, a war that now prepares to celebrate its fourth anniversary. The death toll edges towards two million. Elsewhere, another war of choice by another declining Cold War power has begun. Beyond the immediate loss of life there are second and third order risks, unintended consequences—the potential loss of desalinization plants that support the survival of regional populations, the loss of the primary fertilizer supplies that feed much of the world—that could lead to the death of millions or, in an absolute worst case scenario, billions
As one attempt at genocide grinds more slowly, attention shifts and a northern neighbour’s population becomes the new target, and countless further individual human beings through no fault of their own will be forced to deal with immense suffering for murky goals that at best seem unachievable through violence—if one is willing even to grant that the goals of the aggressor are the genuine long-term peace and prosperity of its own people.
And those are only the conflicts the average person will be vaguely aware about. The headlines. Like an iceberg, what everyone notices on the surface is hardly even the start of it. In the western Congo, a proxy war between the Rwandan-backed M23 and Congo-backed FDLR has been waged since 2022. Safety and security are the stated goals, resource access is the likely true one. Same as it ever was.
There has been open conflict in some form in the region stretching back to, at a very minimum, the mid-90s and Rwandan genocide which resulted in at least 500,000 deaths. At its height during the Second Congo War that followed from 1998 through 2003, 5.4 million people were killed. The death toll of the ongoing conflict as of 2026, not to mention the toll on those who have been forced to choose between fleeing into another kind of uncertainty and suffering or remain within a perpetual state of war and non-governance through the entirety of it, is genuinely unimaginable.
There are countless other cases, and elsewhere more simmers. Always. Perhaps it is this and not the little bits of good we all desperately try to cling to that is truly eternal, even as all of us on the outside of the circles of true wealth and power desperately work to convince ourselves this isn’t the case and that we might be able to do anything about it.
In Ecuador, an oligarch elected president is spoiling for a fight with his neighbour who is larger, has a stronger military, and supplies an Ecuador perpetually on the brink of energy crisis with 25% of its electricity. Whatever validity might lie in Ecuador’s grievances over drug trafficking, unsanctioned cross-border military strikes and dead civilians along with the constant upping of rhetoric seems, at its most foundational, not about improving the lives of the people and more an effort by an oligarch president to impress another oligarch president who has an acrimonious relationship with the leader of Colombia. People will die and people will suffer so that one rich and powerful man can, maybe and if it all works out perfectly for him, impress another rich and powerful man.
In Ethiopia, where president Abiy Ahmed was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for his efforts to end a decades-long border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea, Ahmed remains in charge but there is again talk of war. Ethiopia are the world’s most populous land-locked country, and that population is booming. Ethiopia see their history stretching back two millennium to when the Aksum Empire, the source of Ethiopia’s claim to being the world’s second oldest Christian nation, controlled much of the Horn of Africa including Eritrea, crossed the Gulf of Aden, and ran through much modern day Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula. And so Ethiopia believes it has both a historical right and a geopolitical imperative to the ocean.
When Eritrea gained independence in 1993 following three decades of conflict, Ethiopia lost its ocean. In recent years and following Ahmed’s Nobel, instead of looking towards Eitrea’s coastline, Ethiopia negotiated with the breakaway Republic of Somaliland for freeport access to Berbera. This of course infuriated Somalia, who saw it as a granting of legitimacy to the breakaway and globally unrecognized—but by any reasonable measure more stable and prosperous—Republic of Somaliland. Then Eritrea chose to throw their support behind Somalia. To which Ethiopia responded by rekindling their interest in Eritrea’s coast. Sudan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia then threw their support behind Eritrea. Open war now appears likely, again.
Where will all of this lead us, in another decade? And is there any way, realistically, for any of us out here on the outside to move the needle and make the slightest bit of difference to it all? Or are we fated to watch everything fall apart in slow motion while we desperately seek our diffuse shared distractions, crumbs of happiness that we can for a time convince ourselves are eternal while relegating the horrors around us to the peripheral, even if all along the slow decay of the world must continue inevitably, like some hamfisted, horribly self-indulgent parable for universal entropy.
At least in the midst of all of that insurmountable wrong-ness, though, we will be able watch our old clips of Mohamed Salah cutting inside onto his left foot, leaving a defender or three or four discombobulated snatching at air or even fallen to the pitch while the ball hits the top corner of the netting beyond the outstretched hand of a goalkeeper—an Everton goalkeeper or a Tottenham goalkeeper or a Manchester City goalkeeper.
Saying all that out loud does deel silly and self-indulgent and hyperbolic. In fact, probably absurd should be appended to all of those for good measure. But it’s all also a coping mechanism of sorts. That finding of good things. Small things. Distracting things. Things that we can get together with people in other places, other cities and countries, to agree are good and distracting even if, fundamentally, we know they are small. It’s something we humans are pretty good at, really. Right now, it rather feels as though we have to be—or a lot of us quite simply wouldn’t survive. None of us do anyhow, in the end.
In the meantime, maybe things will keep getting worse. Probably they will. The greed and selfishness and stupidity of the richest few will mean industries will continue to be gutted so those richest few can get even richer in their guarded gated walled moated estates while an increasingly dysfunctional climate drives new waves of refugees. The greed and selfishness and stupidity of the most powerful individuals will see countries wage new wars of choice for territorial gain or resource gain or to settle petty grievances old and new. Rarely if ever will it benefit the actual people, the ones who work in the industries being gutted for profit or the territories being fought over for the gains of the few.
Maybe it’s inevitable this will all seem selfish and silly and small‚ and self-indulgent and hyperbolic. Never mind also being an awful long way from something that started off as about Mohamed Salah. Certainly, in the absolute kindest reading, it’s Liverpool-centric in the extreme, even if the need for distractions as a coping mechanism is universal. Everyone does it. Arsenal and Manchester United fans have their own versions. Their Thierry Henrys and Wayne Rooneys. The people who turn up their noses at sport as distraction have their own versions of this, too, every last one of them.
We’re all here, though, and on some level and for some not insignificant portion of the global population, sport and Liverpool and Mohamed Salah has been a constant. The constant. For the better part of a decade. The one thing that somehow, against all the odds, never got worse. The good thing that could last forever. Every game. Twice a week. Through countless records and trophies. Right up until the moment it all ended, as everything must. Speaking of parables, hamfisted or otherwise.
