Mohamed Salah will go down as an all-time Liverpool great, but his form this season has not been anywhere near his usual standards. There is much online debate about whether it is a decline in the player, or the impact of Arne Slot’s tactics, so we’ve looked at the data to investigate.
The 2024-25 season included one of the all-time great individual campaigns by a Liverpool player.
Aged 32 at the time, Mohamed Salah shoved suggestions that he was on the wane down his doubters’ throats by scoring 34 goals and producing 23 assists in 52 games in all competitions, including 29 goals and 18 assists in the Premier League to help Liverpool lift the title.
All this came in Arne Slot’s first season at the club, which suggested the Dutchman knew exactly how to get the best out of the Egyptian superstar.
Salah even said as much on the day Liverpool clinched the title at Anfield against Tottenham, telling Sky Sports: “You can see the numbers. Now I don’t have to defend much. The tactics are quite different. I said ‘as long as you rest me defensively I will provide offensively’, so I am glad that I did.
“[Slot] listened a lot and you can see the numbers… When you play in the Premier League you have to defend but I said that I can gamble and make a difference. My number of assists shows that, you can create chances as well.”
It was enough to earn Salah a two-year contract extension, but not only has he been unable to maintain his sensational form from last season, 2025-26 has probably been his poorest campaign since arriving at Liverpool in 2017.
After 32 games this season, Salah has just nine goals and eight assists in all competitions. For a lot of wingers, that would be a perfectly reasonable return at this stage of a season, but for Salah, it is a big drop off.
His least productive campaign since joining Liverpool was in 2019-20 when he only managed 36 goal involvements, though the Reds still won the league that year with 99 points. Salah will have to more than double his current total in the last couple of months of this season to even equal that.
For context, it took Salah just 16 games – half the number he’s played this season – to reach 17 goal involvements last season. After 32 games in 2024-25, he had 40 goal involvements.
Salah initially took to Slot’s football like a house on fire, scoring 32 goals and assisting 22 more in their first 41 games together in all competitions. However, in the 43 games since, Salah has just 11 goals and nine assists.
So, why the drop off? Is it as simple as age catching up with him? Possibly, but given he’s only one year older than last season when he was producing superhuman numbers, that seems a little easy for an excuse.
Could it be that the manager is asking different things of him? Slot went as far as dropping Salah for a run of games in December, and following a third game in a week in which he’d started on the bench, not even coming on in the 3-3 draw at Leeds United in December, the Egyptian sought out the media in the mixed zone.
He suggested that he had been “thrown under the bus,” adding: “I said many times before that I had a good relationship with the manager, and all of a sudden, we don’t have any relationship.”
Things have been smoothed over since, and following his return from the Africa Cup of Nations in January, Salah was back in the team. He has four goals and four assists in 12 games since, including back-to-back strikes against Wolves in Liverpool’s 2-1 loss in the Premier League and 3-1 win in the FA Cup at Molineux last week.
It was the first time Salah had scored in consecutive games since finding the net against Brentford and Aston Villa in October/November, and perhaps pointed to form being found again by the forward.
Tuesday was a landmark occasion for Salah as he overtook Jamie Carragher to claim the outright record for the most appearances for Liverpool in the European Cup/Champions League (81), but it didn’t go according to plan as he was subbed in the 60th minute in the 1-0 loss to Galatasaray.
For once, the Egyptian didn’t seem to be all that surprised or annoyed to be taken off, perhaps accepting that his performance hadn’t been good enough to stay on.
In his hour on the pitch in Istanbul, Salah failed to record a single shot, had just one touch in the opposition box, and made just one pass into the Galatasaray final third. He also only attempted one dribble, which was unsuccessful.
Of course, Salah is far from the only underperforming player at Liverpool this season. The Reds’ title defence capitulated after winning their first five league games of the campaign, and they are now scrapping for a Champions League spot. They also have work to do to stay in the Champions League in next week’s last-16 second leg at Anfield.
With the signings last summer of Florian Wirtz, Hugo Ekitiké and Alexander Isak, it seemed clear that Liverpool wanted to reduce their reliance on Salah’s goals and assists, but they likely wouldn’t have foreseen such a drop off in his numbers so soon.
After 32 games, Salah is averaging 0.24 non-penalty goals per 90 this season, with 0.44 non-penalty goals per 90 in 2019-20 his next worst, almost double.
Salah has averaged 2.8 shots per 90 this season, his lowest for Liverpool (next lowest 3.3 in 2022-23), so is it as simple as him not having as many opportunities to score?
It should be noted that he has only taken two penalties this season, scoring both, whereas he had 12 last season, scoring 11, which will obviously skew his overall finishing numbers a bit.
So, just looking at his non-penalty shots, his efficiency is still at its lowest point since arriving at Anfield. Salah has converted just 10% of his non-penalty shots (including blocked shots) this season, with his next worst 10.7% in 2019-20. It had not dipped below 13.3% since then, though, and last season was up at 14.7%.
The bottom line is he’s having fewer shots than ever before for Liverpool, and is also converting them at his lowest rate.
He is also having fewer big chances than ever before (0.7 per 90). Big chances are opportunities from which a player would reasonably be expected to score. In addition to having fewer of them, it’s also Salah’s worst season at Liverpool for big-chance conversion, with just six of 20 finding the net (30%). He has not had a big-chance conversion percentage worse than 40.9% for the club in a season before.
It’s not like he’s being starved of the ball, though. Salah is still having a decent level of involvement in games. He is averaging 51.2 touches per 90 this season, only having more in three of his eight previous campaigns at Liverpool.
The problem is he’s not seeing as much of the ball as close to goal as he’s used to. His 7.5 touches in the opposition box per 90 is the lowest he has ever averaged for the Reds, and down from 9.6 last season.
When comparing his touch-zone map from last season to this, you can quite clearly see the difference around the box. Salah had 20% of his touches in the opposition box last season, which is down to 15% in 2025-26. He also had 44% of his touches in the zones around the edge of the box in 2024-25, which is up to 53% this season.
Could it therefore be that Slot’s setup is keeping Salah away from goal for some reason?
When you compare his touch maps from each of this season’s games against Galatasaray, it paints a picture of how little Salah is seeing of the ball in dangerous areas. Of his total of 52 touches across both games, he touched the ball in the Galatasaray box just once.
That’s not to say it’s been like this in every match, but given they were two games against the same opponent over five months apart, it is notable how little difference there was in where Salah took his touches.
That’s not to say his touches outside the box are worthless. Salah doesn’t get enough credit for his creativity, and while those numbers are also a little down this season, he has still been able to create chances for teammates.
He is averaging 0.28 assists per 90 this season, more than in his two most recent campaigns at Liverpool. That’s bang in line with his 0.28 expected assists per 90, which is his joint-best in a sesaon for the club.
His 1.7 chances created from open play per 90 is better than four of his previous Anfield campaigns, while his 0.56 big chances created this season is his third-best effort.
That said, if you just look at his Premier League numbers, Salah isn’t having the same impact. He’s averaged 0.21 expected assists per 90 in the league this season, only twice recording lower figures since joining Liverpool.
Despite his tepid performance on Tuesday, Salah’s Champions League performances have been dragging some of his overall numbers up. He’s averaged 0.54 expected assists in Europe this season, and 0.97 big chances created, so his struggles may be more related to the fairly significant tactical tweaks made by several Premier League clubs this season. With teams generally going more direct and focusing on set-pieces, there seems to be fewer opportunities for open end-to-end games, which is where Salah has so often thrived.
Something else that has come under scrutiny is his dribbling. Memories of Salah from yesteryear are of him gliding across the turf, turning defenders inside out, and racing away from them like a Warner Bros cartoon.
Now, when Salah stands his full-back up, it’s hard to picture him keeping the ball, let alone zipping away from them.
He’s still trying, just not quite as often as usual. Salah averages 3.1 dribbles per 90 this season, only twice averaging fewer in his Liverpool career, but his 27.8% success rate is his lowest at the club. He did only average 31.6% in Klopp’s final campaign (2023-24), but otherwise it’s never been below 39.3%, which he managed last season.
Again, though, it’s notable how those numbers change when just looking at his Premier League appearances. Salah averaged 3.7 dribbles per 90 in the league last season, with a 42.3% success rate. This season, he’s averaging 3.0 per game, with just a 20% success rate.
So, he’s dribbling less often, and with less than half the success when he does.
Liverpool often come up against low blocks, but they have been facing them more often this season (26%) than last season (22%), while their time spent facing high blocks has dropped from 25% last season to just 20% this. Simply put, Salah has often had less space to be able to take a full-back on.
It is worth noting that on the other side, Cody Gakpo’s dribbles attempted per 90 in all competitions have also gone down from 2.9 last season to 2.5 this, but his success rate hasn’t dropped anywhere near as much (from 50% to 48.1%).
Harking back to Salah’s comments about benefitting from not having to do as much defending in 2024-25, he is doing a bit more on that side of things this season than usual, which could be having a knock-on effect on his attacking output. His 0.59 tackles per 90 is the second most he’s averaged in a single campaign at Liverpool, while his 0.35 interceptions per 90 is the most.
So, is it Salah or the system that’s to blame? Well, apologies for sitting on the fence somewhat, but it appears to be both. He isn’t getting as many chances as usual, but he also isn’t generally taking the ones he does get.
His dribbling has certainly become far less of a weapon, but then it went from being quite ineffective in 2023-24 to excellent again in 2024-25, so it’s not necessarily just an age thing. The way teams are setting up against Liverpool is likely a factor, and Slot and his players have struggled to work out a consistent way of dealing with it.
Despite the overwhelming success of playing to Salah’s strengths last season, it seems Slot has tried to make the team less dependent on him, and only succeeded in showing how reliant they actually were/still are.
There is also the fact he has had an array of different right-backs behind him this season, and none of whom profile anywhere close to former teammate Trent Alexander-Arnold, who provided so much ammunition for Salah during their time together.
In the interest of saving what could still be a relatively successful season if they can clinch Champions League qualification and win at least one of their two remaining possible trophies, perhaps Slot needs to go back to what he knows and get Salah as close to goal as possible, as often as possible.
At the same time, the player himself needs to discover that groove again that petrified defenders, and back-to-back home games against Tottenham and Galatasaray next week could be ideal opportunities to do so.
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System or Salah? What is the Cause of Liverpool Star’s Lacklustre Season? Opta Analyst.
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