Is Mohamed Salah having the best season in Premier League history? Liverpool’s superstar is smashing records

The record for most goal involvements in a Premier League season has stood for over 20 years. Andy Cole set the high watermark, registering a combined 47 goals and assists in 1993-94. The following year Alan Shearer, the marauding star of Blackburn Rovers’ title triumph matched it. Both hit those dizzying heights across 42, Shearer starting every single one and missing only eight minutes across the course of the season.

On his current trajectory — and assuming he plays every minute available to him — Mohamed Salah will better that mark some time in the second half of Liverpool’s home game against West Ham. In April. With six more fixtures left before the end of the English domestic season, one where it seems inevitable Salah and his team mates will be crowned champions.

As for Salah, all he needs to do is keep turning up and playing at anything like the levels he has hit for most of the seven-and-a-half years since arriving on Merseyside and this will be the best individual season seen in the Premier League. Keep playing like he is now and it won’t even be close. Salah’s 2023-24 will occupy the highest echelon of campaigns, all the more so if Liverpool can match their domestic achievements in the Champions League. A way below the pomp of Lionel Messi at Barcelona in 2011-12 but really that is about it.

In England we really have not seen much like this in living memory. It is not that long ago that a forward ended the season top of the scoring and assisting charts but Harry Kane’s 2020-21 was a year where a solid return on both fronts was enough to double up on prizes. Luis Suarez’s 2013-14 is the most obvious comparator among those to have worn a Liverpool shirt while reaching the pinnacles. The Uruguayan, however, was pipped at the post by Yaya Toure and Manchester City, the foe who Salah so emphatically vanquished on Sunday.

Erling Haaland’s brute scoring took him as close to Shearer and Cole as anyone had come in two decades. Finding a flaw in his brilliant debut year in Europe feels a bit like picking out the worst track on OK Computer — it’s still pretty excellent — but Haaland’s was just a triumph of putting the ball in the net. In terms of creating and finishing, the one man Salah has left to overhaul is Thierry Henry. At his very peak in 2002-03 the Arsenal forward delivered 24 goals and 20 assists, a record that is still to be broken. With 11 left to play Salah finds himself on 25 and 16.

“The numbers speak for themselves,” said Arne Slot on Sunday. It’s just there are so many of them, records seemingly recast every time he takes the pitch. Which are just ephemera, which a sign of a forward breaking new ground? Eleven games with a goal and assist so far in the Premier League when the previous best was seven. That sounds quite good, right? The first player to score and assist in both games against the champions. A bit esoteric, not quite reflecting the fact that the guy who runs up these numbers usually plays for the top team, but it’ll do quite nicely.

Project out and you see just how great this might be. At his current rate of 0.6 assists per game — given this is a player who has exited a league game before the 80th minute just once this season and played the full 90 in 20, per game stats have their uses — he could go well clear of Henry and Kevin De Bruyne’s joint record of 20, hitting 22 or 23. His current scoring rate extrapolated for the remainder of the season would leave him just one short of Haaland’s record of 36 in a season. If Liverpool have the title wrapped up as soon as it seems they will, it is fair to assume that their last couple of games will revolve around little more than seeing what records they can manufacture for Salah to obliterate.

It is well within the realm of possibility that Salah breaks BOTH the Premier League scoring record and the Premier League assist record this season.

Suppose that the 32-year-old comes back down to earth somewhat as the season winds down. Imagine that he starts performing at his advanced metrics rather than above them. This would still be the greatest the Premier League has ever seen. Take 0.75 expected goals per 90 and keep him on the pitch right the way through the run in, Salah ends up on 33 goals scored. That would beat his own peak back in year one at Liverpool by one goal. It would be better than anything ever put up by Cristiano Ronaldo, Henry, Suarez, Sergio Aguero, or Kane. In fact anyone other than Cole, Shearer and Haaland.

Assists meanwhile, they’re the fiddly one. For a time it looked like Kane, eight to his name through the first six games in 2020-21, was going to blow by the 20 goals provided mark. Mesut Ozil too was cruising beyond it at the turn in 2015-16. It is one thing for Salah to rely on his own finishing skills, another to be dependent on Darwin Nunez and Dominik Szoboszlai. All he can do is keep putting the ball on a plate for them. At 0.37 expected assisted goals per 90, he’d match De Bruyne and Henry.

If this season proceeds as it should based on his expected metrics for the season so far — which are more predictive than his past performances — then this season will end with 55 goal involvements for Mohamed Salah in the Premier League. He would probably have a direct hand in more goals than Manchester United. A third PFA Player of the Year title that would make him the first ever three-time winner of English football’s individual prizes would only be the start of it. Perhaps the Champions League would throw up some strange forks in the road but Salah’s Ballon d’Or case would be hard to beat. Michael Edwards might feel compelled to throw in that third year of big money too. 

He’ll have earned it. All it takes is Salah staying fit and playing anything like the Salah of the past eight years — not even the supernova version of the last seven months — and he will have delivered arguably the finest individual season the Premier League has seen. Keep on his current path and there won’t even be an argument to be had.