How does Mohamed Salah stack up against... historical Salah?

Mohamed Salah added another assist to his record on Wednesday, and it was one of his best of the season. Data science has yet to come up with an Expected Aura breakthrough, but once that happens, we might be able to explain what compelled Newcastle’s entire defense to stare at Salah and ignore his passing options even while he was double marked.

Salah is now on 25 goals and 17 assists for the season, and he’s whooping everyone in Europe on conventional counting stats, as Josh Williams pointed out on Twitter.

We don’t talk about counting stats on this newsletter often because we write a lot about whether or not guys are worth their contracts/transfer fees and try to predict future performance, and traditional counting stats aren’t great for that. But I’ve always found them very fun just as a fan of sports, and Salah is closing in on some very cool counting stats milestones.

He’s both 3 total goal involvements and 3 assists off the 38-game Premier League season records for those stats, and he’s on pace to be the first player to post a 30 goal/20 assist season in these schedule constraints. As I wrote last week, he’s comfortably the best player in the league and is going to run away with the player of the year awards.

But that piece was a bit more about how Salah is aging, and how long of a contract Liverpool should be willing to give him. Today I had the thought of looking into how Salah’s current season compares to his best (and another recent great winger season), since he’s chasing down these big counting stat milestones.

It’s certainly possible that with 10 games left to play, Salah turns in some absurd performances that take this season over the top. But at the moment, I still think his debut season — where he scored 32 Premier League goals (and 11 in Europe!) — is his best. He was an utterly monstrous shooter, ending the season with 0.6 xG per 90 and 142 total shots. As much as I enjoy the more well-rounded nature of Salah’s current game, the 2017-18 version of Salah might be the most dangerous winger the league’s ever seen.

This season compares a bit more favorably to Salah’s second player of the year campaign. He was still putting up pretty nuts shooting numbers — 0.54 xG per 90, 134 total shots on the season — but finished exactly on his xG. In both 2017-18 and this season, he’s overperformed it consistently.

It seems kind of absurd to call a season “sneaky good” when a player received the player of the year award, but this might actually be the most well-rounded version of Salah? He’d improved as a passer, but hadn’t lost any dribbling or pressing capability yet. A couple more lucky shots and wonder if we’d consider this to be his best campaign.

This season might end up as Salah’s best ever season for his counting stats, but I’m not sure it’s as good as either of his previous POY campaigns. And the guy’s scored 100 goals in the 5 seasons where he hasn’t been the player of the year. What an outrageous footballer.

Just for some fun and #banter, here’s this season’s Salah up against the only other winger to win the FWA POY since StatsBomb started recording data, 2018-19 Raheem Sterling. While Sterling was an outrageous dribbler and had some excellent shot selection, I think current year Salah stacks up pretty well here.

I’m fairly certain Salah would smoke 2013-14 Eden Hazard and 2012-13 Gareth Bale in a statistical breakdown, if we had those numbers available. I’m not so sure about 2007-08 Cristiano Ronaldo, who was completely outrageous. If anyone wants to do the work on that, I’d love to see/share it.

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