Mohamed Salah spent some of his evenings during Liverpool’s summer tour of the United States re-watching his performances in friendly matches, assessing where he could have done better.
I chose this short anecdote to close Chasing Salah, my new biography about him, because it shows how his appetite for self-improvement — far from diminishing with age — actually seems to be growing. It is an attitude which could yet prolong his career at the highest level for longer than others, certainly those once defined simply by their ability to run very fast.
It is regularly claimed that he has lost a yard of pace and maybe that is true. Yet does it automatically translate into a decline, or a lack of effectiveness? Few footballers care for themselves like Salah, who at 32 is a very different player from the one who arrived at Anfield as a red blur in summer 2017. Today, he is a better all-rounder — a forward whose understanding of the position means he is easily on course to break the 20-goal barrier for an eighth season in a row, and to carry on being a compelling creative force (as his two assists against Bayer Leverkusen on Tuesday underlined).
Perhaps it is not hard to imagine Salah hunkered down in an American hotel room fixated by the small details from tour games whose results ultimately counted for nothing. He is viewed as an obsessive because his image is managed carefully through social media, where his life seems to involve a reliable routine of training ground, gym, and his home in Cheshire, where he lives quietly with his wife, two daughters and their cats. If he is on holiday, he is likely to be found facing the ocean from an infinity pool in a meditation pose.
It explains why I wanted to write the book: Salah needed decoding.
He has been difficult to avoid since joining Liverpool, not only because of his achievements but because of the commitment he makes to himself and, subsequently, his availability. Though he is always there in plain sight, he rarely speaks publicly and when he does, it can often be cryptic. There had to be a reason for this.
Last weekend was one example. He scores a wonderful goal against Brighton, reminding everyone of his capacity to determine the outcome of games — just as he did away to Arsenal in Liverpool’s previous Premier League fixture — and then posts a short message on X.
Top of the table is where this club belongs. Nothing less. All teams win matches but there’s only 1 champion in the end. That’s what we want. Thank you for your support last night. No matter what happens, I will never forget what scoring at Anfield feels like. pic.twitter.com/c2rVHQxjK8
— Mohamed Salah (@MoSalah) November 3, 2024
Ordinarily, such a communication would probably pass without much scrutiny. But this is Salah, and even by his standards, these are not normal circumstances. His contract is on course to be up next summer and nobody seems to know whether he’ll stay. He writes that he is happy Liverpool returned to the top of the table, but it is where the team “belongs. Nothing less”.
Remember, Liverpool’s medal haul over the past four years amounts to wins in two Carabao Cup finals, with Salah missing one of them because of a hamstring problem, and one FA Cup final, when he got injured and had to be replaced during the first half. This is not a player who has been suffused with silverware in what feel like the peak years of his career.
And then, the pay-off: “No matter what happens, I will never forget what scoring at Anfield feels like.”
For many, it sounds like he is preparing himself to say goodbye. Alternatively, might he just be reminding leading figures at Liverpool that the clock is ticking and they’ll have to find someone other than him to make a difference when it really matters if they don’t get their act together soon?
The message is open to interpretation and it keeps us guessing, adding to the intrigue around him. Hence, it was worth digging deeper, trying to find out why he communicates the way he does and gives so little away about himself (a clue: everything leads back to his homeland of Egypt).
Salah is an idol in his native Egypt (Khaled Desouki/AFP via Getty Images)
Generally, Salah likes speaking in riddles but he can be emphatic when he senses injustice. This has been shown numerous times in Egypt, during battles with the country’s football association. More recently, he was willing to challenge Liverpool’s then manager Jurgen Klopp, in front of the whole world, at a perceived unfairness.
After being left out of the team at the end of last season, as Liverpool’s title challenge fizzled away, he reacted to words from Klopp as he tried to introduce him as a substitute moments after an equaliser from West Ham. Klopp was annoyed at the amount of time it had taken for Salah to get ready to go on. Salah, meanwhile, disagreed — reminding him he could not be held responsible for West Ham getting back into the game because he was not on the pitch, a decision which was all on Klopp.
I wanted to get to the bottom of that but more importantly, I wanted to examine how far the fire lay beneath his seemingly cool surface, and to what extent that impacted upon his connection with those around him.
It is important that any new book about a person’s life offers new information and researching and writing this one involved speaking to multiple sources connected to Salah and Liverpool, although the vast majority of these were not prepared to be directly quoted.
Even so, I would find out a lot of things I did not know, including details about his relationships with Klopp, team-mates, and perhaps most importantly, his representative Ramy Abbas — his neighbour in Dubai, where they own property in the same luxury apartment block not far from the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.
While the dynamic between him and Klopp was never anything more than professional (Salah felt he learnt more tactically from Luciano Spalletti, his coach at previous club Roma), he and fellow Liverpool forward Sadio Mane were combatants in a Cold War.
Ex-Liverpool striker Roberto Firmino wrote in his own book last year that there were problems between the pair and the simmering tension occasionally bubbled over — notably in a game at Burnley, when Mane was furious at Salah for not passing him the ball. And that was not the only occasion: another time, Mane rowed with a teammate who had accused him of not being sharp enough in a game, suggesting that Salah — who had been equally ineffective — had unfairly escaped criticism. The argument continued to half-time and, when Klopp tried to intervene, the manager also became the focus of Mane’s ire.
Readers might find some of this hard to accept, given the roles Salah, Mane and Klopp had in Liverpool’s rise, especially during an era where in-house media exclusively makes everything seem so compellingly unified. That glory was obtained with some collateral damage should be no real surprise, however, given internal competition and confrontation features so regularly in the stories of successful sports people and the institutions they represent.
Relations between Salah, Mane and Klopp were not always smooth (Peter Powell/AFP via Getty Images)
From here, Salah’s future will be determined by conversations between the club and Abbas, a man who is resolute in sticking to his position and cares little for what others think of it. It was a point he underlined on Wednesday morning with an Instagram post celebrating Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president.
Yet the more people I spoke to for the book, the clearer it became that compromise was a feature of both his and Salah’s tactics last time his contract needed sorting out. In 2022, Abbas even sensed reluctance from the decision-makers at Liverpool when they made an offer that clinched the deal, making him wonder whether they even wanted his client to sign it in the first place.
It was another instance of not everything always being as it seems in the unique world Salah occupies.
(Top photo: Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)
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