'Unfortunately the day has come' – Mohamed Salah is leaving Liverpool, and nothing will quite be the same

He posted a video to his social channels on Tuesday evening, sitting in front of a wall of trophies, and said “Unfortunately the day has come.” Mohamed Salah is leaving Liverpool at the end of this season. After nine years, 255 goals, 122 assists, 435 appearances and seven major trophies, the Egyptian is walking away from Anfield as a free agent, a year before his contract was due to expire, after the club agreed to cut it short.

It's the kind of announcement that lands like a full stop at the end of a sentence you weren't ready to see finish.

The manner of it is what makes today so complicated, because this isn't the clean farewell the story deserved. Salah signed a two-year extension only last April, when Liverpool were champions and Arne Slot was being talked about as the perfect successor to Jurgen Klopp.

By December, Salah was giving fiery interviews after being dropped for the game at Leeds, saying the club had thrown him under the bus, that someone inside Anfield didn't want him there, that he felt scapegoated for a team that had started to stutter. It was the most uncomfortable public moment of his Liverpool career, more jarring than any transfer saga, and it cast a shadow over everything that followed.

He came back from AFCON, returned to the side, scored a few times, but the form and the frequency of the previous eight years never quite returned. Ten goals in 34 appearances is the number that tells that story, and it's a brutal summary for a man who scored 44 goals in a single season in 2017-18.

The story, though, is what he was for nine years.

Liverpool signed Salah from Roma in the summer of 2017 for £34 million. That fee, which felt like a gamble at the time given what had happened during his Chelsea years, now looks like one of the most absurd pieces of business in Premier League history.

By the end of his first season he had scored 32 league goals, obliterating the record for a 38-game Premier League season that had stood since Cristiano Ronaldo set it in 2007-08. He won the Golden Boot, won the PFA Players' Player of the Year, won the FWA Footballer of the Year, and he did all of it while playing with the freedom of a man who understood, from the moment he arrived at Melwood, that Klopp had built something he could thrive in.

The Champions League that followed in 2018-19 is the centrepiece of what Liverpool built with Salah at the front of it. He was injured in the final against Real Madrid the previous year, one of the more heartbreaking images of that season, and came back to score in the first minute against Tottenham in Madrid to set Liverpool on the way to their sixth European Cup. That goal, 25 seconds in, delivered in front of 60,000 people in the Metropolitano with the composure of someone who'd been waiting for exactly that moment, summed up everything that made him the player he was.

The Premier League title in 2019-20 was the one that ended a 30-year wait for the club, and Salah was central to it in the way he was central to everything at Liverpool for most of a decade.

He formed the most feared attacking trio in European football alongside Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mane, a combination so fluid and so relentlessly productive that opposition managers spent entire press conferences trying to explain how they planned to contain it, and then spent the 90 minutes finding out they couldn't.

When Mane left in 2022 and Firmino followed in 2023, Liverpool restructured around him. He kept scoring, kept creating, and he renewed his contract in 2024 when he could have gone to Saudi Arabia for sums that would have made him one of the highest-paid athletes in any sport.

He chose Anfield instead, and said he believed the team could keep winning. That decision, made freely and with full knowledge of his options, tells you more about what the club meant to him than any press release.

The numbers he leaves behind are the third-best goalscoring record in Liverpool's history, behind Ian Rush and Roger Hunt, two names that exist in a very particular category of Anfield mythology. Four Premier League Golden Boots. An assist record of 122 in all competitions that no winger in the club's modern history comes close to. Two league titles, a Champions League, an FA Cup, two Carabao Cups, a Club World Cup and a UEFA Super Cup. He's one of the most decorated outfield player of the Klopp era.

Salah said in his video that he's “firmly focused” on the best possible finish to the season, and knowing him, that isn't a polite platitude. He's the kind of player who wants to win the last game as badly as the first one. If he goes out holding a trophy in May, the complicated parts of this season will fade into a footnote.

That's how legacies work, and his is already secured regardless.

“You gave me the best time of my life,” he said, sitting in front of those trophies. “I will always be one of you. This club will always be my home, to me and to my family.”

When the Kop sings his name later this season, for what will be the last time, it won't be complicated at all. It'll just be nine years of the best football Anfield has seen in a generation, and the sound of 54,000 people saying thank you.