Editor's Note: This piece was originally published on Jan. 21 as Liverpool faced a tough decision over their two star forwards, Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane. The story makes the case as to why Salah was so valuable to Liverpool's prospects, and we've republished it Friday in light of Salah signing a new long-term deal with the club.
More and more elite soccer players are performing well beyond age 30, which is the typical point when skills begin to wane and fitness declines. But one player, Liverpool's Mohamed Salah, is subverting that idea all by himself.
Over the past decade, the average Premier League winger usually has a career that looks something like this:
You burst onto the scene sometime in your late teens or early 20s. Maybe you get a couple of spot starts here and there -- some Carabao Cup time -- but most of your minutes come off the bench. When you're on the field, it's all dribbling; you get the ball, put your head down and make the crowd go wild each time you glide by a defender. Fans wonder why you're not playing more; coaches know that you're not really helping the team win by slowing the ball down every time you get it.
Eventually, you figure out how to pick your spots, turning all that individual skill into value. You stop dribbling quite as much and start moving the ball faster, making runs in behind the defense and scoring goals. By your mid-20s, you become an indispensable starter, the kind of player just about every modern team needs: a skillful creator or goal scorer or creator-goal scorer from out wide. You've got the physical range to influence the match away from the crowded middle, and your ability to influence the game from the wing also draws the opposition out and opens up space for your teammates in front of the goal.
At this point, you've achieved a fine balance: Your decision-making and technical skill have improved from a half-decade-plus of playing professional soccer, but you're just as fast as you were when you were 20, and if your club has a strength program worth a damn or you've improved your diet or even if you've followed the right Instagram workouts, you're also a lot stronger, too. But then, all of a sudden, the physical skills begin to decline, and you no longer have the range to influence the game from out wide. You're 30 and you're not starting, or you've left for MLS or China, or you've made the transition to a central role; maybe you've turned into a wingback, a position where your attacking and defending no longer matter as much.
That's just how it goes. Over the past decade in the Premier League, per analysis from The Athletic, wingers averaged right around 4.5 dribbles per 90 minutes from ages 18 through 21, and then that number declined with each year the calendar flipped over. However, as the dribbling drops off, the playing time increases. The most "winger minutes" were played by 26-year-olds, with a good chunk also coming in the three years before and after that peak -- before a sudden drop-off to age 30, and another drop-off to age 31.
In other words, the prime of a winger runs from 23 to 29, and then those players tend to fall off a cliff.
Liverpool, of course, have a superstar winger who, at this moment, might just be the best player in the world. They also have a superstar winger who turns 30 in June. His contract expires about a year after that. With negotiations reportedly underway for a potential new deal, this is the argument the winger and his agent should be making: Mohamed Salah has never been an average player, so why the hell should you expect him to age like one?
Being an older athlete no longer means you're close to retirement
The other day I was talking to someone who's worked with a number of top clubs throughout Europe. One of the smartest people I know, well aware of how age curves work, he told me, "We have super-athletes now." What he meant was that thanks to advancements in things like diet regimens, training and recovery technologies, there's now a certain type of athlete who can maintain elite performance well beyond what we're used to seeing.
This is true across almost all sports. In the NBA, LeBron James and Chris Paul are still two of the best players in the league -- they're 37 and 36 years old, respectively. According to a report in Sports Illustrated, there were 16 players in the NBA last season aged 35 or older. In 1982, there was just one. Nearly half of the All-NBA players (seven out of 15) last season were 30 or older.
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Meanwhile, in the NFL, Tom Brady is better than ever, and he was born when Jimmy Carter was still president. Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers is all but guaranteed to win his second straight MVP award -- and he just turned 38 in December. There were 26 players in the NFL this season 36 or older. The top eight passing-yardage seasons in NFL history were all produced by quarterbacks who were 32 or older. At 44, Brady threw for the third-most yards in NFL history this season. Peyton Manning set the NFL record in 2013 -- when he was 37.
Last summer in Tokyo, Oksana Chusovitina, a 46-year-old gymnast, competed in her eighth Olympics. This time it was for Uzbekistan, but she's been around for so long that she was able to represent the Soviet Union at one point. At the same competition, Sue Bird (now 40) won her fifth gold medal for the United States women's basketball team. A couple of months before the Tokyo games, Phil Mickelson became the oldest man to win a major tournament in golf when he took home the PGA Championship at age 50. In tennis, Roger Federer remains one of the top 20 players in the world at age 40 and won his 20th and most recent Grand Slam at age 36, while Rafael Nadal, who is 35 and ranked fifth in the world, won six of his 20 after he turned 30.
And then there's soccer. Among the previous five Ballon d'Or winners, not a single one has been younger than 30. Meanwhile, from 1977 through 2002, not a single Ballon d'Or winner was over 30.
Now, that's in large part due to the dominance of perhaps the two best soccer players of all time: Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. They're examples to add to the trend, but they're not the only ones, either. Luka Modric was 33 when he won the award in 2018. Zlatan Ibrahimovic is the leading scorer for AC Milan, who are second in Serie A, at age 40. After spending his 20s as a secondary contributor, Karim Benzema is leading Real Madrid to La Liga titles well into his 30s.
Robert Lewandowski, who would have his own 30-something Ballon d'Or if the award hadn't bizarrely discontinued for a year in 2020, has basically only improved after turning 30.
Could Salah be another one of these super-athletes?
One thing all of the above names have in common is they are all obsessed with their fitness. If you've seen Salah score a goal and then take his shirt off, well, then yeah. Not much else needs to be said, right? But to put a finer point on it: The guy just never gets hurt.
Since Salah joined Liverpool in the summer of 2017, he's played 13,923 Premier League minutes. That's more minutes in domestic play than all but three other players across Europe's Big Five leagues over the same span: Lazio's Francesco Acerbi, Brighton's Lewis Dunk and Burnley's James Tarkowski. The difference is that they're all center-backs; in fact, among the top 10 minute-getters since 2017, Salah is the only attacker. The next most used attacker over that stretch was Leicester's Jamie Vardy, at 13,185 minutes, and he might serve as an instructive example.
Vardy led Leicester to the Premier League title in 2015-16 with 28 goals in his age-28 season. That's right when strikers typically start to decline. Leicester could have let him join Arsenal that summer, but they didn't; he remained mostly healthy, and he averaged 18 non-penalty goals plus assists over the following five seasons as they continued to challenge for a place in the Champions League. Had Leicester cashed in, they would've scored a nice profit for a guy they acquired for a little more than $1 million, but they also would've said goodbye to a guy who continued to produce like one of the best strikers in the Premier League for another half-decade.
In Salah, Liverpool have a player who ranks in the 99th percentile at his position over the past year in non-penalty expected goals plus assists per 90 minutes, per the site FBRef, and you're not just getting fleeting moments of elite goal-creating efficiency. You're getting elite goal-creating efficiency pretty much all the time because he's always on the field.
It's not just goals and assists, either. Salah is also in the 99th percentile for progressive passes received and touches inside the penalty area. Along with Kylian Mbappe, he's the best outlet in the world, and the best at breaking in behind a defense. Oh, yeah, and he defends relentlessly, too: His 9.19 pressures in the final third per 90 minutes also ranks him in the 99th percentile among all wingers.
As much as it's possible to be one, right now, Salah is pretty much the perfect modern soccer player. He scores, he creates, he finds space, he gets into the box, and he chases down the ball as soon as he loses it. If Salah were being paid what he's worth, he'd easily be the highest-paid player in the Premier League, if not the world.
Now, no one remains perfect forever, and there's a flipside to all of those minutes. They could be an indicator of rugged durability, or they could be an accumulation of wear that will inevitably lead to injury. Just ask Real Madrid how that Eden Hazard deal is going. Then again, Hazard is, um, famously unconcerned with his fitness, while Salah is built like a mid-tier Greek god. Plus, while the science of injury prediction remains incredibly imperfect, one of the things that seems to provide at least a tiny bit of signal in predicting future injury is past injury. Previously injured players are more likely to get injured than healthy ones, and Salah might be the healthiest attacker in all of Europe. It's a virtuous cycle: Since Salah hasn't really been injured, he hasn't experienced any degradations to his athleticism, either.
The thing that makes these super-athletes, well, super is that there aren't many others like them. Most wingers -- even most great wingers -- still start to decline a good bit once they enter their 30s. But there is at least a growing mini-population of age-defying superstars across all sports. And while the probable outcome for just about every professional athlete in every sport is a steep drop-off as they get older, if you were picking the one 20-something soccer player in the world most likely to become the next super-athlete, it would be Mohamed Salah.
There's also a not-insignificant chance that he isn't, but if you're Liverpool, can you really pass up the opportunity to get the other answer: What if he is?