It speaks volumes of Mohamed Salah’s level that a player on two goals and three assists after six league games is being so heavily focused on.

Liverpool’s title-winning season was powered by the Egyptian’s goals – 29 of them in the league – but this summer’s attacking arrivals made it easy to forget about the man who has been vital to the success at Anfield over the last eight years.

After a campaign in which he scored 34 goals across all competitions, Salah’s year so far has been underwhelming, even if the numbers on the surface don’t suggest that.

He has three goals and three assists in 748 minutes; only Hugo Ekitike has scored more for Liverpool this season. He is 12th in the league’s top scorers and another goal would lift him up to fifth. On an xG front, he is overperforming having scored 0.2 goals more than he should have. That ratio is his fifth-best in terms of his seasons for Liverpool so far.

And yet, Salah this year is the perfect example of why stats do not always tell the whole story.

Simply put, Salah has not looked good. A hallmark of his style has been the ability to have the ball fired into him, control it and then use his impressive core body strength to hold off opponents before curling a shot into the back of the net. The most Salah goal of all time earned him the goal of the season award when he drilled through the Manchester City defence to finish from a tight angle.

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But this season, there has been none of that. He has been anonymous in large portions of games – and not in the way a venomous snake is anonymous in the long grass until it bites you.

Breaking down his goals also shows there has not really been much of that Salah magic that fans have become used to. His first goal of the season was on the break late on against a Bournemouth side pushing for an equaliser; his second came from the penalty spot. Salah’s stats may look good on the goal front but he is in the bottom 10% for successful dribbles. He only completes a fifth of the ones he attempts, putting him in the bottom 15%. He has already been dispossessed 12 times this season, putting him in the worst 5%.

Salah’s zero goals, zero assists and three shots against Crystal Palace earned him a spot on the bench for Liverpool’s away trip to Galatasaray, the first time he has been dropped in 2025 and the first time he has not started a game since the early rounds of last season’s League Cup. It is also the first time he has been dropped for a Champions League game that was not a dead rubber since 2022.

Arne Slot explained his absence as a need to focus on fitness but Liverpool had three days between this fixture and their Premier League game against Palace, then another four until their next fixture against Chelsea. Salah’s penchant for taking his shirt off in celebration also demonstrates he is one of the fittest members of the squad and has never looked like a player in need of a rest.

The makeshift Liverpool team that lost 1-0 to Galatasaray also suggests the decision was not entirely fitness-based. Dominik Szoboszlai started at right back while Jeremie Frimpong was moved up to right wing. Salah did eventually make his way onto the pitch, replacing Frimpong in the 62nd minute, but his 30-minute cameo produced zero shots and just 19 touches.

Salah’s start to the year does not exist in a vacuum either. 93% of his league goals last year came in the first 75% of the season; in the final quarter of the year, he scored only twice. That form continued into the new campaign has resulted in an existential question – is he over the hill?

In the era of modern sports science, age has become an increasingly irrelevant number and the fact that Salah is now 33 is not enough to write him off completely but instead, it is worth looking at the games played when deciding whether a player may be past his best.

For club sides, Salah has made 651 appearances and featured a further 83 times for Egypt. Salah shares a trait with Lionel Messi in that he is also rarely substituted meaning his minutes played is up to 50,741. Son Heung-Min, who is the same age as Salah, has played 3,000 minutes less. Sadio Mane, also 33, has spent 4,000 minutes less on the pitch. James Milner, a player famed for his longevity and who is six years older than Salah, has only been on the pitch for 6,000 more minutes than his former Liverpool team-mate.

This is no doubt something the Liverpool higher-ups were considering when it came to Salah’s contract negotiations last season. The conventional wisdom would be to not renew a player at that age and with that many minutes in the legs, one who data suggests will soon drop off but when Salah was playing as well as he was coupled with the PR nightmare of losing one of your best homegrown talents for free, renewing him became a must.

Liverpool have paid £380,000 a week for the privilege and while they recruited heavily in the summer, there was little improvement when it came to the right wing, perhaps under the assumption that Salah would have another season like last, one where he scored in the first three games of the season.

Salah is also not just the cause of Liverpool’s issues but a symptom of them. The team that ran away with the league last season may be top but they remain unconvincing and results have come from individual moments of brilliance like Szoboszlai’s free kick against Arsenal or costly mistakes by opposition such as Hannibal Mejbri’s handball leading to Salah’s winning penalty against Burnley. Their xG is the seventh best in the league and their 15 big chances is bettered by three other teams. Only one of their games has been won by more than a single goal: their opening-day victory against Bournemouth when the Cherries were pushing for an equaliser.

A look at Liverpool’s form table shows a whole lot of green but that does not tell the whole story and perhaps the two red marks most recently are a little closer to the truth of a side yet to fully click. Next for Liverpool is Chelsea, a team in a far worse crisis and one which Salah has scored eight times against.

Writing a player off who has scored 248 goals in 410 Liverpool appearances is a fool’s gambit but there comes a time when every player is undeniably past their best. Come the final whistle at Stamford Bridge on Saturday, almost 20% of the season will be gone and if Salah is still struggling, Slot will have a tough decision to make about the man who won him the league.

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