Arne Slot: “Already the first day I was impressed by his professionalism because as with any season, it starts with a test that shows how much they did in the off-season and he beat all of them. He was the fittest player that came back, and I think that’s the ideal situation that you want as a manager: that your star player comes back as fit as he did.”
Jurgen Klopp: “The desire for scoring made him the most uncomfortable player to rotate. Mo decided in his head which game is appropriate for him to rotate and which not. That you had then really the situation, ‘Now it’s enough, 60 here, 60 there.’ I took him off after 85 minutes, that was five plus extra time, 10 minutes, he could have scored three goals, in his mind.”
Trent Alexander-Arnold: “At any given moment throughout the season you could ask him, one of his competitors in a Golden Boot race, how many goals are they on? And he’d be able to tell you. Top five in the Golden Boot race right now, he’ll be able to tell you. At any given moment throughout the season, how far away are you from the top? ‘Well, (Erling) Haaland’s on this’ or ‘(Harry) Kane’s on this’. ‘But he scored six pens and we’ve only got two’, that kind of thing. And then once he started realising he could get assists, that’s when it was like, ‘Whoa’. He would know everyone’s stats.”
Michael Reid, football data editor at Opta: “We obviously have data for all the Premier League era, so from 1992-93 onwards, but Salah’s records were so ridiculous that we realised we had to go beyond that. The amount of times we were doing stats and you’d try to put other players up on a leaderboard but Salah would be just there ahead of them. It would be just impossible to get a table where Salah wasn’t above this player because he was so multifaceted. What we tried to do was get maybe two or three Salah records or stats lined up before every game. He got to a point where every time he gets a goal or assist, there’s some sort of record he’s breaking.”
Jordan Henderson: “He was just constantly working to improve. For nine years, every day. There was never a day off. Even when he was off in the summer, he was just constantly working. Always thinking, ‘How can I be better next season?'”
Klopp (to That Peter Crouch Podcast): “He was not happy with his finishing in Rome or wherever and he built a goal in a back garden. Every year he came from a summer break – where he had not really a summer break, playing with Egypt or whatever – after two weeks and added a new skill, a new idea.”
Ben Foster, former Watford goalkeeper in 2021: “He came up to me at full-time and he’s got his hand over his mouth a little bit because he didn’t want the cameras to catch it so much. He’s come up and he’s gone, ‘Ben, if I’d have got a penalty, which way would you have dived?’ Now as soon as he said that I thought, ‘Oh you clever, clever boy.’ Because we do our research, all the goalkeepers out there do their research on strikers.
“I’ve looked at him and I’ve gone, ‘OK, I’d have dived to my right because you put your last five penalties to the right.’ A big smile came upon his face, a big grin and he went, ‘Thank you, I need to know, I need to know.’ So not content with just winning the game 5-0 and being Man of the Match and scoring an unbelievable goal, he has to know the tiny little details.”
