Mohamed Salah has come under fire for his displays this season, but would dropping the Liverpool forward really be the right move for the Reds?
MANCHESTER, ENGLAND - NOVEMBER 9: Mohamed Salah of Liverpool during the Premier League match between Manchester City and Liverpool at Etihad Stadium on November 9, 2025 in Manchester, England. (Photo by Robbie Jay Barratt - AMA/Getty Images)
Mohamed Salah during the Premier League match between Manchester City and Liverpool at Etihad Stadium on November 9, 2025
View Image
Theories on how to resolve Liverpool's current issues have been plentiful over the past few weeks of underperformance. And one of the most constant has centred on Mohamed Salah.
After last season's stellar displays which took the Reds to the Premier League title, the Egyptian has found life tougher in the current campaign and has seen his performances regularly criticised, with several calls for Arne Slot to drop him as the Dutchman seeks to integrate summer signings Florian Wirtz, Hugo Ekitike and Alexander Isak and his evolving team.
But would dropping Liverpool's third highest goalscorer of all-time really help solve the Reds' current woes? We asked our writers what they think.
Paul Gorst
In the lengthening list of problems at Liverpool this season, Mohamed Salah features behind a litany of other, more pressing concerns.
The Egyptian has not been at his blistering best so far and looks nowhere the levels he was at 12 months ago, when he was tearing strips off the Premier League. His 29 Premier League goals, in fact, virtually fired Arne Slot's side to the title by the time the warmer months had set in.
Five more so far this season, however, sees him behind only Hugo Ekitike and while this has been a big-spending summer to renovate the attack, the idea of Salah being phased out to accommodate the likes of Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak feels a bit premature.
The prospect of Ekitike and Isak being paired together as something of a more traditional two-man frontline has yet to be tried as an experiment and it is a tactical ploy the head coach might trial at some stage, particularly if attacking midfielder Wirtz plays directly behind the pair and tasked with loading the bullets.
In fact, it is something Slot might have forced upon him when Salah departs for the Africa Cup of Nations in December. Let's see how Liverpool fare with the 33-year-old out of the team from that point of the campaign.
It does feel too soon to say Salah is over the hill. He's barely six months into a two-year contract that every commentator in the land was demanding be put in front of him and his advisors after that spellbinding season.
Instead, rather than simply wielding the axe, the more pertinent question for Slot is how to get his forward line firing with the 'Egyptian King' in the team alongside Isak, Ekitike and Wirtz.
'Dropping' the club's finest marksman of the Premier League era feels like it would be a rash overcorrection to a difficult couple of months. Stick by him and the goals will inevitably return again. There are far more concerning problems to address first.
Ian Doyle
There's a very good reason Liverpool don't need to drop Mohamed Salah. They'll soon have a lengthy period when they find out what life without the Egyptian truly is like.
Probably a bit too much is being read into his performance at Manchester City which, by the way, could easily have led to an assist for the disallowed Virgil van Dijk header, with Salah inches away from scoring himself in the second half.
Instead it might be worth concentrating on his showings against Aston Villa and Real Madrid where he was very much the player who romped to all the individual awards last season.
Benching him for any extended period of time during the next seven games would therefore be a bit daft given Liverpool will be without him for perhaps the same timescale again due to the Africa Cup of Nations.
That will most likely be the period where Arne Slot finds out how best to operate without Salah going forward because, now in his 34th year, the Egyptian isn't going to go on forever and is very much nearer the end of his Anfield career than the start.
Salah is Liverpool's player for this season and next and the task must be to extract the very best from him during that time. Dropping him now is very much not the way to go, then.
Mark Jones
Why take Mo Salah out of your team when you don't need to? Especially when there is a period coming up when you'll have no choice but to leave him out?
When Liverpool return from the international break they will do so to a fixture list which is a lot kinder than the one that has preceded it, and it looks to be a period which provides ample opportunity to get the season back on track after the difficulties of the past few weeks.
Salah will have a key role to play in matches against Nottingham Forest (home), PSV Eindhoven (home), West Ham (away), Sunderland (home), Leeds (away), Inter Milan (away) and Brighton (home), and then he'll be off to the Africa Cup of Nations and so Arne Slot will have no choice but to pick a side which doesn't include him.
Until then he stays in, and Liverpool look to rely on a man who has come through for them time and time again.