If I had to sum up Mohamed Salah's performance for Liverpool this season in one sentence, it would be this: He has no contemporaries.
Through February, the Egyptian winger has scored 25 goals and assisted 17 more. That's 42 goals+assists. In the Premier League, the next-best mark comes from Newcastle's Alexander Isak, who has 19 goals and six assists. It's a reverse Wayne Gretzky situation: Salah would still have more goals and assists than Isak if he hadn't registered a single assist this season.
If we expand it beyond the Premier League and to Europe's "Big Five" top leagues, Bayern Munich's Harry Kane gets the closest, with 21 goals and seven assists. The gap between Salah and Kane (14 goals+assists) is the same as the gap between Kane and Osasuna's Ante Budimir, who is tied with eight other players for the 38th-most goals+assists so far this season.
Any more analysis against anyone else from this season, and we're wasting our time. Salah could sit out the rest of the season, and he'd still win Premier League Player of the Year. The gap between him and whoever is No. 2 in the world right now is bigger than it's been since sometime before Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo were trading back Ballons d'Or.
Liverpool still have to win a few more games to wrap up the Premier League, and they have a tough path to another Champions League trophy, starting with Paris Saint-Germain this week. But as individual achievements go, Salah is no longer competing with anyone who is playing in either of those competitions. To stake his claim among the best, he competing against seasons that have already happened; he's competing against history.
So, how does Salah's season compare with the greatest individual seasons we've ever seen? Let's take a look.
All stats referenced are for domestic play only.
We'll start with Salah's goals+assists
For simple counting-number purposes, we're counting all goals and assists as equal.
Penalty goals aren't the same as converting a chance from open play, and Tottenham manager Ange Postecoglou recently derided assists as "the most useless statistic in world football." Assists award the passer as much, if not more, for the shooter's ability to convert the chance as they do for the quality of the chance created. Non-penalty goals and advanced stats like expected assists or expected goals assisted are better predictors of future performance or even controllable in-the-moment performance.
But we need simpler statistics to measure players across history. And when we look at all goals and assists across recent history, we still end up with a list of the best attacking players to ever play the sport.
The site FBref has goals and assists data from the entire history of the Premier League (1992 onward), data for the Bundesliga, Serie A, and LaLiga all the way back to 1998, and data for Ligue 1 starting in 1995. Across that history, there have been 31 individual seasons when a player has registered at least 40 goals+assists.
The following players have done it once in their careers: Andy Cole, Alan Shearer, Thierry Henry, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Ciro Immobile, Erling Haaland, Robert Lewandowski, and Kane. Salah, of course, did it before February was over.
Salah has also now done it twice: this season at age 32, and his first season at Liverpool in 2017-18, at age 25. (If he leaves the club after the season, what a way to start and end his Anfield career.)
Kylian Mbappé, too, has done it twice. Luis Suárez has done it three times, Cristiano Ronaldo did it six times, and Messi finished his European career with 10 such seasons. Messi also broke 60 goals+assists twice, and Ronaldo was the only other player to do it once. And Messi surpassed 50 four times, while Ronaldo got there twice, and no one else did it more than once. Put another way, 50% of the 50 goal+assist seasons are Messi seasons.
Salah is on pace to get there. His current season ranks tied, funnily enough, with his first Liverpool season for the 26th-best goals+assist season in what we'll call the modern history of the sport. If he maintains his current pace (1.53 goals+assists per 90 minutes) over the final 10 games of the Premier League season, he'll get to right around 57 goals+assists.
That would be tied with Luis Suarez for Barcelona in 2015-16 for the best non-Messi-Ronaldo season we've ever seen from a goals-and-assists standpoint, and the fifth-most goals+assists in the modern era.
If Salah performs down to his expected goals+assists level (1.13 per 90), he'll get to 53 goals+assists, which would be the seventh-best season of all time and the best-ever for a player who didn't play for Barcelona or Real Madrid.
That, too, would obviously beat the Premier League record: 48 by Andy Cole for Newcastle United in the 1993-94 season. Cole did this without scoring a single penalty -- this might be the most underappreciated individual season in the history of the sport. Salah, this year, has already scored seven penalties.
However, Cole's record came during the league's brief era of the 42-game season. The record from the current 38-game era was set by Erling Haaland in his first Manchester City season: 36 goals and eight assists in 2022-23. Salah should quite easily surpass Haaland's goals+assists number, and even if his production halves from here on out (down 0.75 goals+assists per game), he would still surpass Cole.
As for the numbers in each individual stat, Messi has the only 50-goal season (2011-12) of the modern era, and Salah has no chance of even coming close. He would, um, have to double his current total to get there.
However, in 2019-20, both Messi and Bayern Munich's Thomas Müller set the new record for assists in a season, with 21. If Salah performs at his underlying level (0.4 expected goals assisted per 90), he'll tie their number by season's end. If he maintains his current assist pace (0.6 per 90), he'll beat it by two.
In the Premier League, the assist record is 20 (held by Henry and Kevin De Bruyne), while Haaland's 36 is the record for goals. Salah has a chance of getting to both marks, but we've already spent too much time on goals and assists. We're close to missing the point.
Important context: Mohamed Salah is not a center forward!
Almost every name we've mentioned is a striker -- or at least something close to it.
Cole, Shearer, Henry, Ibrahimovic, Suarez, Immobile, Haaland, Lewandowski, Kane: these are all players whose job was mainly receiving the ball near the penalty area and then converting the ball movement of their teammates into goals. Even Ronaldo and Mbappe, who both played on the wing, still functioned best when they were allowed to crash into the box from the wing.
That is not Salah's job. While he is an incredibly effective goal-scoring winger, he's almost never getting on the end of chances created by movement down the left wing that opens space for him to make a late run into the penalty area. Both Ronaldo and Mbappé, on the other hand, were surrounded by world-class creative players who could take advantage of their world-class off-ball movement.
No, with Liverpool, Salah is the world-class creative player in the attacking third. He's also the guy who moves the ball into the most dangerous areas on the field. He's also the guy who gets on the ball in the most dangerous areas on the field. And he's also the guy who turns all of that into goals.
He's leading the Premier League in goals and assists, sure. But per FBref, he's also leading the Premier League in touches inside the penalty area and passes into the penalty area. So, he's been the best goal scorer, the best creator, the best facilitator, and the best outlet in the Premier League -- all at the same time.
Of course, being able to be all of those things at once is what made Messi the greatest soccer player to ever live. And Salah's current season might be the closest thing we've ever seen to a Messi season.
The Stats Perform database goes back to the 2010 season for all of the "Big Five" European leagues. Across that dataset, there are six seasons where a player scored and assisted at least 40 goals, registered at least 250 touches inside the penalty area, and completed at least 55 passes into the penalty area.
Four of them come from Messi (2010-11, 2011-12, 2014-15, and 2017-18 with Barcelona). One is Luis Suarez's final season with Liverpool in 2013-14, and the other is Salah right now, with three months still to play in the 2024-25 season.
Messi remains on another planet. He frequently put up 40-plus goals+assists seasons while completing well over 100 passes into the penalty area and completing 80% of his passes or more. Salah has developed into an elite creative player, but his league-leading Premier League numbers would still see him fall below 10 passes into the penalty area this season. And he's only completing 71% of his passes.
Come season's end, though, Salah should easily surpass Suarez's 43 goals+assists in 2013-14. And most of the other players we've gone over have either/both played for teams owned by sovereign wealth funds or/and teams with absolutely massively financial advantages over the rest of their domestic leagues.
Given the relative top-to-bottom competitiveness of the Premier League, given how Liverpool's budget compares to the rest of the teams in the competition, and given how much he's done of, well, everything, Salah's 2024-25 season is on pace to go down as the best all-around attacking season ever put together -- by a player not named Lionel Messi.