Mohamed Salah is the Premier League's best player of the past decade and will leave Liverpool as one of the greats

A look back at Jurgen Klopp’s comments about Mohamed Salah following his arrival from Roma in 2017 highlights the extent of his transformation at Liverpool. “I have followed him since he came up at Basel and he has grown into a very good player,” he said.

It didn’t seem like an understatement at the time. Salah excelled in Italy but returned to England as a so-called Chelsea reject with a point to prove. Klopp spoke of adding competitiveness to an area of the pitch in which Liverpool were “already strong”.

It soon became clear that he would do much more than that. In December of Salah’s first season, after equaling Roger Hunt’s club record of 23 goals before the turn of the year, Klopp was asked if he had exceeded his expectations. “One hundred percent,” he said.

It is no exaggeration to say that his signing also changed the course of Liverpool’s history. He has 255 goals from 435 games, which puts him third on the club’s all-time goalscoring list, and will surely add to that tally before his departure at the end of the campaign.

He helped the club win as many league titles in eight seasons as they had in the previous 30, and that’s before even mentioning the Champions League and six other trophies achieved since joining.

His exact position in the ranking of the Premier League’s greats will continue to be hotly debated. But what is certain is that Salah has secured a place somewhere near the top of the list.

Only Alan Shearer, Wayne Rooney and Harry Kane have scored more goals in the competition. As a wide forward rather than an out-and-out striker, Salah is actually a unique presence among the top-15.

He is also the only player to win the PFA Player of the Year award three times, having clinched his third final term for an individual season that will go down as one of the best in history.

Salah racked up an astonishing 47 goal involvements, the most by any player in a 38-game season, as he inspired Liverpool’s title triumph under Arne Slot. His goals and assists earned them 38 points.

The scale of his contribution in the Premier League over the nine years since his arrival at Liverpool in 2017 is unparalleled.

Salah tops that timeframe for goals, assists, shots, open-play chances created and touches in the opposition box, the competition’s leading scorer and creator.

There is a gulf between Salah and the rest in many of those categories. His combined total of 281 goals and assists puts him more than 100 ahead of the next highest player on the list in Heung-Min Son. The gulf is equally wide for shots and touches in the box.

Remarkably, Salah has scored or assisted a 39 per cent share of Liverpool’s 717 Premier League goals over the past nine seasons.

His extraordinary talent flourished thanks to another superpower: his robustness. Since 2017/18, only Jordan Pickford and James Tarkowski have made more Premier League appearances than his 310. His work ethic has facilitated remarkable consistency.

Liverpool have fallen at points at the top of the Premier League over the past nine years, but until this season, Salah’s individual output never dipped.

Even in his worst campaign for goals and assists, in 2020/21, his combined tally of 27 was the third highest of any player in the division behind Kane and Bruno Fernandes. He was the only Liverpool player in that season’s PFA Team of the Year.

Its managers also deserve credit. Klopp for the platform of his success by moving Sadio Mane to the left to install him on the right side of Liverpool’s attack, then building his side around him; Lock for reducing his off the ball responsibilities to maximize his impact in the final third last season.

Few expected that the contract he signed in the penultimate month of that season would end up being shortened by a year. But Salah set such extraordinarily high standards that the dip, when it finally came, was impossible to miss.

Salah has not been helped by the upheaval around him, including the loss of Trent Alexander-Arnold, whose service he cherished. But age also took a toll. Salah is just three months away from his 34th birthday. A downward trajectory is to be expected.

It appeared he might not get the Liverpool send-off he deserved after the explosive falling out with Slot that followed losing his place in the team in the first half of the season.

But Salah’s reintegration after the Africa Cup of Nations changed that, giving him the chance to go out on a high, after nine years in a league of his own, changing Liverpool’s fortunes and carving his own route to greatness.