The search for certainty: Why replacing Mohamed Salah is Liverpool’s impossible task

There’s a simple idea floating around whenever a superstar leaves a club: replace the numbers, move on, problem solved. Football, unfortunately, doesn’t work like a spreadsheet – especially not when it comes to Mohamed Salah.

Liverpool are preparing for life without the “Egyptian King” at the end of the season. And when that day comes, the biggest mistake they can make is thinking this is just about goals. Because replacing Salah isn’t about finding another forward who scores 20 a season. It’s about trying to replace certainty in a league that has quietly run out of it.

Look around the English Premier League and you’ll notice something odd: everyone is searching for goals, and very few are actually finding them reliably (Erling Haaland aside, but even his output has dropped off at Man City). Clubs are stacked with attackers – quick ones, technical ones, expensive ones – but dependable, bankable goalscorers? Those are in short supply. 

Manchester United have spent years and a small fortune trying to solve that problem. Chelsea have turned it into a revolving door. Even log leaders Arsenal, as slick and well-coached as they are, don’t have that one player you’d confidently bet on to deliver 25 league goals every season – though there are signs of promise in the early form of Viktor Gyokeres. 

That’s what makes Salah different. Not just the goals themselves, but the guarantee of them. Season after season, he shows up.

He stays fit. He scores.

He does it from wide areas, in big games, in tight games, in moments where nothing else is working. He isn’t just Liverpool’s top scorer – the four-time Golden Boot winner is their safety net.

And that’s the part that’s hardest to replace. Maybe if Alexander Isak was fit and firing it would soften the blow. He’s neither!

Modern football has evolved in a way that makes players like Salah increasingly rare. Wingers are creators, strikers are often facilitators, and systems are designed to spread the goalscoring responsibility rather than concentrate it. Goals come from everywhere, which sounds great in theory, until you actually need one. 

Because when a game is drifting, when patterns break down and the system isn’t clicking, or that low block seems impenetrable, someone has to take responsibility. Someone has to turn half-chances into goals. For nearly a decade, that someone has been Salah.

Take him out of the equation, and Liverpool aren’t just losing their top scorer – they’re losing the answer to multiple questions at once.

Who scores when nothing’s working? Who stays available all season? Who delivers in the biggest moments?

There isn’t a single signing that fixes all of that, or at least none that I can think of. It’s no coincidence that Salah’s dip in form has coincided with a drop in output from the entire Reds frontline.

And that’s where Liverpool’s challenge starts to look a lot like everyone else’s. The rest of the league has already been trying to solve this puzzle: how do you build a team that scores consistently without relying on one elite, reliable forward? 

Some have tried spreading the goals around. Others have tried buying a traditional No. 9 and reshaping everything to suit him, like City have done with Haaland. A few are still stuck somewhere in-between, endlessly tweaking and hoping something clicks.

Up to now, Liverpool have had the luxury of not worrying about it too much. Salah gave them structure in the chaos, reliability within a system that could sometimes feel unpredictable. He scored a whopping 255 goals in 435 appearances. Take that away, and suddenly they’re searching like everyone else.

That doesn’t mean collapse is inevitable. It just means they have to adjust – to redesign the way they score. Maybe that means more shared responsibility. Maybe it means a tactical shift. Maybe it means accepting that, for a while, the goals won’t come quite as easily. And that’s the uncomfortable truth.

For years, Liverpool have operated with something most clubs don’t have: certainty in the most uncertain part of the game. They knew where their goals were coming from. When Salah leaves, that certainty goes with him. And in today’s Premier League, that might be the hardest thing of all to replace.