Yes it is. Over the past 3 seasons, he is either sprinting less or running less, which means he is likely managing himself carefully and recovering from those sprints with period of walking rest in a way he didn’t have to do 4 years ago. All players do it, but as you hit your 30s you need more of them and longer. It is to his credit that this season he appears to be sprinting more, but as you note we are not even at the halfway mark, and these numbers almost always trend downwards through the season.
We are not looking at dropping off a cliff, this is a slow decline. If it was a sharp drop, we would not be having this discussion.
Mo is scoring and assisting with great regularity. He is our most reliable contributor in the final third, so it is a conundrum. How long can he go on at this sort of level? Or similar?
To my eye, he is past peak. Not by a lot, but he is now on the downward slope, although so far it is a fairly minor thing. He doesn’t get away from fullbacks as he once did, and he isn’t quite as strong in holding off the challenges (it’s an unfortunate fact that for most of his Liverpool career he has been fouled continually, and he gets only a small fraction of the free kicks he should).
It is difficult to comment on the contract situation because we don’t know the terms being discussed. Is Mo insistent on three years at a higher rate than now? Slightly higher? Much higher?
Are we happy to do two more years on the same rate, but no more, as we can’t blow up our wage structure, even if Mo continues to be the highest paid player?
We just don’t know the terms, so it is hard to say what we should do.
I hope we keep him, as he is excellent. But if he decides to move on, I’m sure we will be fine. Slot will necessarily build his own side, and while he has benefitted from inheriting a great player called Salah, he inherited him near the end, so he would have always been thinking about how he might shape his team beyond Mo. If not yet, it will be soon.
Who knows mate, buying ABC is just the start of it…turns out £35-40m was enough to sign world class game changers in Sadio and Mo wasn’t it? Whoever you sign, they still need to be coached and developed. From there they either become stars like Salah and Mane or flops like Doku and Sancho. Of all the big money signings Chelsea made, it’s their 30m man who’s producing the goods right now.
They also need time, possibly elsewhere. Doku arriving from Rennes to City isn’t comparable to Salah arriving to Liverpool from Italy. Mo has made steps from the time he joined Chelsea from Basel. Also, this is not Liverpool from 2016 or 2017.
Point remains, club moves on and there will be new players. Does that have to be a high scoring winger? No it doesn’t. Can a winger come here and get to those numbers by having better team mates and improve individually? Yeah, possible.
Are the chances higher that our next main goalscorer will probably be more of a central player than us finding someone like Salah who will come in and start banging 30-40 goals a season? Yes, they are. What Salah is doing is hard to find.
I don’t have any expectation that an elite professional athlete who knows full well that his club is speculating about whether or not his legs are aging too quickly to merit a long-term contract - and is definitely still producing - to stay mum about the whole process. Not many players with that kind of passive mentality become elite to begin with, quietly accepting limitations of any kind goes against the grain.
I don’t think FSG are necessarily wrong, we are hitting up against some brutal hard truths about aging and decline, but if Salah is going out on the pitch and giving it all, he is allowed to have some complexity in how he addresses the situation.
It might. We have form for unearthing good signings.
The other part is we don’t know how long Mo will be a world class game changer for. Will he still be that in 3 years time? I hope so, but there are legitimate question marks over how much he will decline and at what point.
It’s a dangerous game predicting what point in time his decline will set in, many people thought that was 12-18 months ago and he’s proving a lot of people wrong (yes, myself included before anyone gets twitchy). I think with someone like Mo, we just have to let him motor on and do what he does best. Right now 95% of the fanbase are desperate for him to stay…if the club ultimately decide to follow through and he ages 10 years overnight, goes horribly wrong etc, then it’s a decision which we’d all accept looking back as we were all on board with it.
