Mohamed Salah has left Liverpool, yes, Liverpool without Salah is no longer a question mark. In fairness, he had probably already left the season before, judging by how many weekends he spent watching from the bench instead of being out there. That’s not a cheap shot; it’s just what happened. He was dropped for West Ham in late November, then didn’t even make the squad for the Inter Milan game in December after telling reporters he felt thrown under the bus.
By April, he was back on the bench for the Champions League quarter-final against PSG. A player who had barely missed a big game in nine years spent his last season fading in and out of a team that used to be built around him.
So when the actual announcement came in March, it landed less like a shock and more like a confirmation of something we’d already watched happen in slow motion. Liverpool without Salah is no longer a hypothetical; it’s the season we’re actually about to watch.
He leaves with numbers that will take Liverpool a long time to replace on paper alone. 257 goals in 442 appearances since arriving from Roma in 2017. This is the first season since that summer that Liverpool go into a campaign without him. Nine years is long enough that an entire generation of matchgoing fans has never known an Anfield without a Pharaoh-like number 11 on the right. That absence alone would be a story. But it’s not the only thing that’s changed.
Because this isn’t just a post-Salah Liverpool, it’s a post-Slot one too. Arne Slot was sacked, and Andoni Iraola arrived from Bournemouth to take over a team that had just finished fifth with 20 defeats in all competitions, their worst return since 1992/93. Andrew Robertson and Ibrahima Konate also left over the summer. So Iraola isn’t walking into a job where he just needs to find a new winger. He’s rebuilding pieces of a team that fell apart last season, and figuring out how to replace its best player at the same time.
To his credit, Iraola hasn’t tried to pretend the squad is finished. At his first press conference, he was blunt about it:
“Obviously we have signed two players already, but we need more players. We know this. The club is working on this.”
That’s not the kind of thing a manager says when he’s happy with what he’s got. It’s an admission that the rebuild is still in progress, and that the club knows it.
Rebuilding Liverpool Without Salah
So far, the answer to “who replaces Salah” hasn’t been one name; it’s been a plan spread across a few. Victor Munoz came in from Osasuna for around €40m as Iraola’s first signing, a quick, versatile forward who can play right across the front line rather than just occupy Salah’s old spot. Jeremy Jacquet arrived to shore things up at the back. Barcola talks are still going, with PSG holding out for a fee well above what Liverpool have offered, with Liverpool perhaps not looking to break their record transfer fee for the third time in the last two summer transfer windows, and now there’s a second name in the mix too.
Liverpool have had an initial bid for Brighton’s Yankuba Minteh turned down, but personal terms are already agreed, and the player is understood to want the move, so this one has real legs. Reports are clear he’s being lined up alongside Barcola, not as a fallback if that deal collapses, which tells you Iraola isn’t looking for one winger to replace Salah; he’s looking to end up with two new ones. Nothing there is finished yet. It’s a plan still being set in motion, not a solution, and that gap between wanting reinforcements and actually having them is exactly where Liverpool currently sits.
What that means in practice is that no single new face is going to solely take up the Salah role where he just proved his importance week in, week out. It’s going to have to come from more than one direction, and some of that weight falls on players who are already at the club.
Which brings us to Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz, the two names Iraola needs to come good more than any other. Isak arrived last year as a club-record signing and barely got the chance to show it; his first season was wrecked by a broken leg and a string of fitness problems that limited him to a handful of appearances. He’s now saying he feels fully fit heading into the new campaign, which, after the year he’s had, is worth taking with some caution, but also genuine hope. If Isak plays anything close to the level that made Newcastle fight to keep him, Liverpool have a real focal point up front again.
Wirtz is a different kind of question. His first season in England was a quiet one by the standards of his price tag, the usual adjustment period for a player who’d never played outside Germany. That excuse doesn’t really hold anymore. He’s had a full year to learn the league, the physicality, the pace of it. This is the season where we find out if last year was simply an adjustment, or something more concerning.
There’s also a real question over whether Iraola’s style suits this squad right now, separate from the goals problem entirely. A few days ago, after Liverpool blew a two-goal lead against Monaco, he admitted his players don’t have the energy to sustain his approach for a full 90 minutes, saying they were good for the first half hour and faded from there.
Fair enough this early in preseason. But Liverpool are back in the Champions League this year on top of the usual cup games and a league season that already wore them down last time out. If the team can’t hold a shape for 90 minutes now, doing it twice a week across three competitions is a different problem altogether, and it’s worth asking how fast that gets sorted before it starts costing actual points.
Put those two next to Muñoz and whatever comes of the Barcola and Minteh pursuits, and that’s what becomes of Liverpool post-Salah at least before another transfer market comes around. Not a direct swap, but a wider spread of responsibility across the front line. Whether that’s actually enough is the real question hanging over the season.
What Liverpool Without Salah Looks Like This Season
Because Liverpool without Salah means walking into this campaign without the most reliable source of goals they’ve had in almost a decade, under a manager who is still openly saying his squad isn’t finished. Now, plenty of good teams have reinvented themselves around new focal points before. But it is a genuine unknown, and the Premier League doesn’t wait around for teams to find their feet. Newcastle away to open the season will tell us very little on its own. What the next few months will tell us is whether Isak and Wirtz can actually be the players this team now needs them to be, and whether Iraola gets the extra signings he’s already asked for before the window shuts.
Salah’s gone. The goals he used to score aren’t gone with him in the sense that someone still has to score them. Right now, it’s genuinely not clear who that’s going to be, and that uncertainty, not the pun in the headline, is what will actually define Liverpool without Salah.
