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Ryan O’Hanlon
Multiple Authors
Depending on the severity of his hamstring injury, Mohamed Salah has played somewhere between his last and his fifth-to-last game for Liverpool.
If you had to pick one person who most represents the modern era of Liverpool, it would be Salah. Mainly because he is the only one who has always been there. Since joining from Roma in 2017-18, the Egypt winger has played 26,124 Premier League minutes — more than everyone other than Everton goalkeeper Jordan Pickford and his teammate James Tarkowski. Among forwards, the next closest is Son Heung-Min, with 5,000-plus fewer minutes.
Then, of course, there are all the goals and assists: 191 and 92, respectively — both more than anyone else since 2017-18. The 283 combined goal contributions is 100 more than Son’s second-best tally of 183 over the same stretch. Salah averaged 31 goals+assists over his nine seasons in the Premier League; over those nine seasons, only seven other players reached his average output even once.
It’s hard to imagine modern soccer without Salah. It’s near-impossible to imagine modern Liverpool without Salah.
That doesn’t mean we can’t try, though.
As had been whispered for a number of years before it eventually became public, Liverpool very nearly didn’t sign Salah. Jürgen Klopp preferred Borussia Dortmund’s Julian Brandt, while the team’s data-driven front office was convinced that Salah was a future superstar. This moment, I think, defines why Liverpool went on to be so successful over the next six years.
Klopp was one of the most famous soccer personalities in the world, and he wanted a young star from his old club. At most places, that kind of signing happens automatically; instead, Klopp listened to a bunch of people who had never played professional soccer before, argued with them, and eventually accepted that they were right.
The result: They won everything, driven by arguably the best attacker the Premier League has ever seen. But what would the result have been if Klopp had put his foot down or Salah decided he didn’t want to go back to England? Inspired by a similar butterfly-effect piece from my colleague Zack Kram, here are the 11 biggest differences in this potential alternate reality.
1. Coutinho never leaves Liverpool
The plan was for Liverpool to play with all four: Salah, Sadio Mané, Roberto Firmino and Philippe Coutinho. But then Paris Saint-Germain doubled the world-record transfer fee to sign Neymar, reset the established order of European soccer, and blasted a hole through Barcelona’s plans for the future.
With more than $200 million suddenly sitting around, the Catalan club turned its attention toward signing Coutinho and eventually paid $160 million to pry him from Liverpool midway through the 2017-18 season. Liverpool were happy to make the deal, which essentially paved the way for the signings of Alisson, Virgil van Dijk and Fabinho — the trio that took an unbalanced, elite attacking side and turned them into an all-time great team. But the main reason they were OK with letting Coutinho go is that Salah was a superstar from the moment he arrived at Anfield.
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In our alternate reality, Brandt arrived at Liverpool and was … fine. He turned into a younger version of Adam Lallana — a versatile squad player, but not a needle-moving phenom. So, losing Coutinho was not an option; Liverpool just wouldn’t be able to score enough goals with an attack of Mane, Firmino and Brandt.
2. Barcelona sign Timo Werner and win the 2018 Champions League
Rather than diversifying their target list, Barcelona got fixated on Coutinho and never really had a backup plan. Unable to pry any other ready-made stars from other big clubs in Europe at the last second, they panicked and signed one of the cheaper, backup options they’d established for Dembele: up-and-coming RB Leipzig forward Timo Werner.
In reality, Coutinho didn’t work at Barcelona because the team needed more players who could stretch opposing defenses in behind. In the 2018 Champions League quarterfinals, Roma were able to overturn the 4-1 first leg deficit against them because they were able to throw bodies forward for 90 minutes without worrying about high-speed counterattacks.
But in the alternate reality: With Werner’s speed in behind, Barcelona are able to sit back in the second leg against Roma and counter-attack. Rather than coughing up their 4-1 lead, they win 3-2 in Rome. Liverpool’s defense isn’t strong enough to hang with Barça over two legs in the semifinal, and that set up an El Clasico Champions league final against Real Madrid.
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Barcelona easily dispatched a Madrid side whom they finished 17 points clear of in LaLiga, but the final wasn’t without consequence. Already down 2-0, Sergio Ramos got tangled up with Werner, landed on the German forward, and seemed to wrench his arm as his bodyweight crashed onto Werner’s shoulder capsule. Werner’s shoulder broke apart under the impact, and he was never the same player after the final.
3. Messi is still playing for Barcelona
Remember that whole financial crisis that ultimately led to a news conference where Sergiño Dest wore a knockoff Chicago Bulls uniform as he watched Messi, through tears, tell us that he had to leave the club he has played for ever since he was a child? In our alternate reality, this does not happen.
Werner cost the club just a third of what Coutinho did, and instilled a tiny bit more prudence and trust in youth. They also never signed Antoine Griezmann — remember that weird year? — so although the club still did hit COVID-driven financial problems, they had just enough money available to keep paying Messi while making cuts elsewhere.
4. MLS never signs a broadcast deal with Apple — and the league is more popular than ever
Although, in this new reality, Messi never comes to MLS, the league still continued its steady growth. The quality of play continued to improve, the league continued to offer opportunities to young players from all across the Americas, and bigger clubs continued to attract a higher level of aging superstars than it had in the past. Most importantly, though, people were able to continue watching the games without an Apple TV subscription.
Although the league never achieves the frenzy surrounding Messi’s first month in Miami, attendance never declines like it did last season, the popularity of the competition gradually increases with each passing season, and the league is poised to capitalize on all of the momentum created by the 2026 World Cup.
5. Jesse Marsch is the USMNT manager at the 2026 World Cup
Without having to chase Salah for the Golden Boot in 2017-18, Harry Kane easily wins the award and doesn’t push himself through an ankle injury before the 2018 World Cup. He never has the mid-career dip that happened in real life. With Kane, Dele Alli, Christian Eriksen and Son all at the peak of their powers, Spurs destroy Barcelona with their physical, in-your-face press. They won the 2019 Champions League final.
This sets Mauricio Pochettino on a different career path that never leads to the United States Soccer Federation. Worried that it won’t be able to find a suitable replacement if it goes wrong, the USSF doesn’t rehire Gregg Berhalter in the summer of 2023. Instead, they bring in Jesse Marsch.
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6. Mohamed Salah replaces Cristiano Ronaldo at Real Madrid …
Liverpool’s move for Salah may have been the last of its kind: a cheap deal for a superstar hiding in plain sight. There were two silly things that prevented the wider soccer world from realizing just how good Salah already was while he was at Roma.
The first: his “failure” with Chelsea. Although the same thing happened to Kevin De Bruyne, the fact that Jose Mourinho didn’t want Salah while he was at Stamford Bridge created this idea that Salah wasn’t equipped to perform in the Premier League.
The second: a basic misunderstanding of his performance. At Roma, Salah had “only” 15 goals — fewer than living legends like Marseille’s Bafetimbi Gomis and Bournemouth’s Joshua King. But this misses a number of factors: 1) Salah was a winger, not a striker; 2) none of Salah’s goals came from penalties; and 3) he also created 11 assists. When you simply looked at Salah’s rate of non-penalty goals plus assists per 90 minutes, he was all the way up at 0.95 — better than what Cristiano Ronaldo produced that same season with Real Madrid. And this was despite Salah frequently playing in service of a traditional center forward like Eden Dzeko.
I doubt we’ll ever see another signing where a player had all the objective markings of a superstar and was acquired for the cost of a squad player.
In our alternate reality, Salah stayed at Roma for another year and had his breakout season in Italy instead of England. He hit 25 goals and 15 assists in Serie A, as Roma dethroned Juventus for the first time in seven years atop Serie A. Not only had the world recognized him as a superstar, but his marketing appeal was also undeniable. When Ronaldo left for Juventus in the summer of 2018, everyone knew what was going to happen next: Madrid broke their club record to sign Salah from Roma.
7. … and wins the Champions League with Sadio Mane
While Karim Benzema and Salah were an immediate blockbuster partnership at Madrid — a super-charged version of what Salah had with Firmino at Liverpool — there was still a vacuum on the left side of the front three without Ronaldo. Salah filled much of the goal-scoring void, but he ended up being more of a direct replacement for Gareth Bale. After a run to the Champions League semifinals in 2018-19 and another second-place finish to Barcelona in LaLiga, Madrid didn’t sign Eden Hazard like they did in our actual reality.
Instead, without Salah, by necessity, taking up such a large share of the attacking workload at Liverpool, Sadio Mane had become the undisputed superstar forward at the club. The attack runs through him and Coutinho — everything is much more left-side dominant than it became with Salah at the club. Mane did a bit of everything at Liverpool; in the alternate reality, he does a lot of everything.
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Although Liverpool didn’t challenge Manchester City for the title in 2018-19 or win the Champions League, Mane won Premier League Player of the Year. Madrid made Liverpool a nine-figure offer for the Senegalese star, and since he’s 27 and already into the latter half of his peak years, the club agreed to let him leave.
The first season didn’t result in any trophies, but the following year, one mostly played in front of empty stadiums, prevented any of the other top clubs in the world from ever kicking into gear. With Benzema, Salah and Mane playing in front of Toni Kroos, Luka Modric and Casemiro, Madrid have once again become the clear-cut best team in the world. They win LaLiga and the Champions League, without much competition.
8. Manchester City won five straight Premier League titles by massive margins …
After setting the Premier League record with 100 points in 2017-18, City under Pep Guardiola never faced any real competition without Salah at Liverpool. They won the league by 15-plus points in the four following seasons, and suddenly the Premier League is facing an existential crisis.
Klopp’s Liverpool continue to run City close wherever they play, but without Salah and eventually Mane, the team just can’t find the right balance between attack and defense to win enough points over a 38-game season. Everyone loves watching them play, and no one wants to play them, but the two major trophies remain elusive.
So, the champion is decided seemingly before every season begins. The Premier League has become Serie A of the 2010s, and now it’s getting lumped in with Ligue 1 and the Bundesliga in terms of how farcical its competitive balance has become.
With negotiations for a new TV deal on the horizon, the league is expecting a significant pay cut. Not only that, COVID has thrown into question the business model underlying professional European soccer. And after the biggest clubs in England, Italy and Spain tried and failed to break off and form their own modestly named “European Super League,” fans were furious.
There is political will and economic momentum in support of a massive change.
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9. … and get relegated before the 2022-23 season
The Premier League announces 115 charges against Manchester City for financial breaches that have allowed them to spend beyond the competition’s regulations. And then, a month later, the league announces that it will be relegating City to the Championship, citing the punishment doled out to Juventus in Serie A in 2006 as its precedent.
City throw their massive financial weight behind legal appeals, but the Premier League has the support, both public and financial, of all of its other owners. The value of their assets, clubs they thought were worth billions of dollars, are at risk if the league is no longer competitive. Politicians, sensing opportunity after seeing the populist reaction to the Super League, throw their support behind the league, too.
With every other force pushing against them, City’s appeals are denied, and they spend the 2022-23 season playing in the Championship.
10. Vinícius Júnior leads Liverpool to their first-ever Premier League title
In reality, Liverpool’s 2022-23 season was a burnout. They’d nearly won all four major trophies in 2021-22, but they fell just short in the two most important ones, and then it all fell apart the following season.
In our alternate reality, 2022-23 suddenly becomes an opportunity without City in the way. The club’s aging midfield is able to hang on without playing so many minutes in 2021-22, and it has been aided by the signing of French holding midfielder Aurelien Tchouameni. Salah and Mane and Benzema have seemingly extended the shelf life of Madrid’s midfield, so they’re not interested in signing a player on such a different timeline.
On top of that, Liverpool think they’ve been able to identify another hidden superstar.
Although he has frustrated fans in his limited minutes, the underlying numbers for Madrid’s young, seldom-used, left winger Vinicius Junior are incredible. He’s missed a number of high-profile chances in Champions League matches, so the public read on him is that he doesn’t have a killer instinct in front of goal. This is how he was viewed in reality at the start of his career, but he hasn’t yet had the opportunity to change the perception in our alternate reality.
The presence of Mane and Salah, who play every game and almost never get hurt, block Vini from any significant minutes in Spain, but Liverpool’s brain trust has cobbled together enough of a sample-size across all of the Brazilian’s minutes with his country, in the Copa Del Rey, in the league and the Champions League. Normalize it per 90 minutes, and they see a player who is getting and creating chances like a genuine superstar, but is also pressing the ball in such an aggressive way that would fit perfectly in Klopp’s system. Many are baffled by the $70 million the club offered Madrid, and the offer is immediately accepted as it’s a sizable profit on a player they signed as a teenager.
Vinicius Junior is the best player in the Premier League from the moment he steps on the field. He’s an absolute star in Klopp’s system and fits so well next to Diogo Jota, Christopher Nkunku and Marcus Thuram. No one else in the world can press and create chances like Liverpool’s front line does. Coutinho and Roberto Firmino have remained incredibly productive, too, as they’ve both played fewer minutes as they’ve gotten older.
Surprisingly, Arsenal challenged Liverpool for the title. They’ve been aided by the patience they’ve shown Mikel Arteta after a number of mediocre seasons under their first-time coach and former player. And they’ve also been helped by all of the Manchester City players who have left the club to play for the guy who coached them when he was Guardiola’s assistant.
Liverpool ultimately win the league, but they lose in the Champions League semifinals to eventual winners Bayern Munich, who are led by new signing Erling Haaland. He has just become the first player in modern history to score 60 goals in a domestic season in a Big Five league.
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11. The 2025-26 Premier League season is widely considered the best of all time
The Premier League finally has a rivalry among equals: Klopp’s Liverpool and Arteta’s Arsenal. After a half-decade of worrying about whether his teams would go down in history as the best club side to never win a major trophy, Klopp’s Liverpool have now won two of the past three Premier League titles.
Theirs were sandwiched around Arsenal’s 2023-24 title, which made the Gunners one of the youngest teams to ever win the Premier League. Not only that, Tottenham have rebuilt their squad around Harry Kane. They’ve signed an array of super-athletes who can’t complete a pass, but it doesn’t matter because Kane has transformed into one of the great passing center forwards of all time. His ability to drop deep and play runners into the space he has vacated creates new patterns that befuddle Premier League backlines.
Kane has already won the Champions League with Tottenham, in 2019, but will he be this generation’s Steven Gerrard? The one-club man who never finished atop the table. Pochettino has overseen the reinvention of the club after committing his long-term future to Spurs once they lifted the European Cup. Everyone in North London agreed that they’d need to rebuild the team at some point, especially if they never turned Kane into a massive transfer profit, but the approach seems to now be bearing fruit.
And then there’s City, where Guardiola and a handful of other players stuck around despite the demotion to the Championship. They immediately regained promotion and still won the FA Cup in their one year in the second division. But a massive squad exodus has greatly reduced their talent level. We finally get to see Guardiola coach a team without a large financial and talent advantage over the rest of the league, and his side bounces back up to fifth and then third place in their two seasons back in the top flight. Unlike in our actual reality, where they exist as a kind of faceless existential specter that fans hope to see their rivals lose to, City are now, officially, the villains of the Premier League. Their 2025-26 season is a referendum on the Premier League’s decision to send them down.
Guardiola has announced he’ll be leaving City after the season and Klopp, too, has said he won’t renew the contract that ends in May. With just four games remaining in the campaign, there is an unprecedented four-way tie for first place between Liverpool, Arsenal, City and Tottenham.
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