Mohamed Salah’s Impact on Liverpool and Beyond

Mohamed Salah’s extraordinary Liverpool career is drawing to an end. Since arriving at the club in the summer of 2017, the Egyptian has amassed 257 goals in 441 games — a record only bettered by two players in the club’s history. His time at Liverpool has not been without controversy — as events in the last week have underlined — but his legend is secure. His legacy, however, spreads far beyond Merseyside.

Last weekend, the residents of Granby Street and Beaconsfield Street in the L8 area of Toxteth tacked green, white and red bunting to the lampposts and the Somaliland flag was raised in preparation for the celebration of Sovereignty Day. In 1991, Somaliland, on the Horn of Africa, became self-governing, but in the decades before independence, some of its people started arriving in L8, which similarly can feel very separate from Liverpool, even though it is just to the south of the city centre.

Known by its postcode, it has an identity that is different not only from Liverpool but the rest of Toxteth, which sprawls down towards the River Mersey. There, on the banks of the water, the population is mainly white working class, but further inland, L8 is a largely Black community, initially associated with West African and Caribbean immigration, but more recently with different parts of the Muslim world. An estimated 99 per cent of the population in Somaliland are Sunni Islam, and in L8 they are ferociously proud of their history. In 2024, Liverpool City Council pushed a motion for the UK government to recognise the region’s independence, and residents say the show of support has strengthened their love of Liverpool.

The bunting acts as a demonstration of a confidence that is being tested by the rightward-shifting politics of the city. But not so long ago, residents acknowledge that confidence was not a word you associated with L8 or Toxteth. Since 1981, it has instead been associated with the word “riot” even though locals prefer to call the response to police attitudes towards the Black community and crippling unemployment as an “uprising”. The Somalilanders who have lived in Liverpool the longest think 2008 was a key year for social integration because the city was made the European Capital of Culture. The status did not solve all of Liverpool’s race-related problems, but it moved the conversation along, into a healthier place.

“Then there was Mo Salah,” says Malik Karkar, a language specialist who speaks Arabic and has worked as a translator in L8. Karkar thinks Salah, who arrived at Liverpool in 2017 and plundered 44 goals in his first season, provided a base for discussion between communities that had long stayed out of each other’s way. “Mohamed Salah’s impact goes far beyond football,” he says. “Of course he gave Liverpool goals, trophies and pride. But off the pitch, the impact has been even bigger. He has helped alter the perceptions of Muslims in Liverpool, across the UK and beyond.”

A female resident of L8 puts it like this. She used to work in an educational setting in a mainly white part of the city and when students saw her hijab, they asked her where she was from. The answer was “Sudan” but when she explained that it bordered Egypt, their response was: “… like Salah?” Karkar suggests that Salah’s achievements and sense of being have not just helped Muslims, but have also helped Liverpool be what it can be at its best, a place of “diversity, acceptance and solidarity”. He says that in L8, which has had drug-related problems for generations, Salah’s commitment to meeting the highest standards as a footballer has helped challenge attitudes. “Salah’s clean way of living has changed the way people sometimes lead their lives. Even though he hasn’t met them, he is always present.”

Toxteth and L8 still feels like it is segregated from the rest of Liverpool. Upper Parliament Street cuts the district in half, acting as an unofficial border between the tall Georgian townhouses once populated by rich sea captains on one side and the Granby ward on the other. If any current Liverpool player has a real connection with the area, it is Curtis Jones, who grew up not far away on a new housing estate that blurs into Chinatown. Salah might be unaware of the significant impact he has had on people in L8, especially with younger lads like Imad Ali, who launched a football competition in 2021 that celebrates the different communities living in Liverpool. The World in One City tournament, which has since been held every summer a few miles south of L8, has been a roaring success, drawing camera crews and huge attendances from spectators.

Ali, a Liverpool supporter whose roots are in Yemen, told The Athletic in 2022 that the idea had germinated in his head during a lockdown in the Covid-19 pandemic, but he also asked himself whether he’d have had the confidence to put his thoughts down and show them off in front of everyone, just a few years earlier. “It helps to see players like Mo Salah doing so well,” he said. “He makes you think you can express yourself. Nobody has done that since John Barnes.”

In 1987, Barnes became the first Black player in Liverpool’s history to sign for a fee. Four decades later, he remains a huge figure in L8, where, in the formative part of his Liverpool career, he socialised in its variety of social clubs connected to different regions across the world. Jimi Jagne, one of the “rioters” just six years earlier, is not a big football supporter, but he loves Barnes because he inspired empowerment. “Liverpool is multi-ethnic rather than multicultural,” stresses Jagne, who is part-Gambian and part-Chinese. “But Mo Salah has done wonders for restarting conversations that were very quiet about Liverpool’s identity for lots of years.”

Ian Byrne, a season-ticket holder at Anfield, is a Labour MP for West Derby. He suggests Barnes and Salah are “two of the most important figures in Liverpool’s history,” but it has also helped that Sadio Mane, a Muslim forward from Senegal, played alongside the latter because it indicated the latter was not alone. Before their arrival, one year apart from another, faith was rarely discussed by Liverpool supporters. “We’ve had some good Jewish players (Avi Cohen and Ronny Rosenthal). We also had ‘Rangers/Celtic’ singing on the Kop (when fans would alternate chanting to demonstrate whether they were Protestant or Catholic). But you’d never talk about what someone believed in. When Salah and Mane came along, everything changed.”

Byrne thinks that before Salah especially, Liverpool’s relationship with the Muslim community was, at best, “disconnected”. By 2018, he was heavily involved in the Fans Supporting Foodbanks campaign and one of the mosques in the city became amongst its biggest donors. When Salah played for Egypt at the World Cup that year, the mosque opened its doors. “More than 100 people were there and many of them had never set foot inside a mosque because they were distrustful. Salah helped lift so many barriers. We broke bread, watched the football, and over the next few hours, a lot of people realised they weren’t that different from the person sitting next to them.”

The mood in Liverpool has changed since, however. Earlier this month, Reform UK, a right-wing populist group promoting stricter border controls, shattered any illusion that Liverpool, which since the 1980s has been associated with the left, is unaffected by political tides. The city of Liverpool does not go to the polls until next May, but in local council elections in nearby Halton, Reform won 16 of 19 seats, while in Sefton they also made gains. This follows anti-migrant riots in Liverpool two years ago when a library close to Everton’s old ground, Goodison Park, was burnt down.

When Byrne thinks of Salah, it is not just as a footballer, describing him as one of the “most unifying figures” in the history of the city. “He’s going to be a huge loss.” If social media acts as a barometer of interest, then Salah is the second-most followed Muslim footballer on the planet. At the start of May, he had 65.2million followers on Instagram and 19.2million on X. By comparison, Karim Benzema has an audience of 73.9million and 20.9million on the same platforms.

There are distinctions between the backgrounds and careers of the players. While Salah comes from North Africa, Benzema’s heritage is in the same region but he was born in France, the country he represents. Benzema spent 14 seasons at Real Madrid, the most successful and popular elite club on the planet before moving to Saudi Arabia, a Muslim country which commands high interest as an emerging and wealthy football nation. Since 2017, Salah has been at Liverpool. Before that, he bounced between four other European clubs and he does not have an attachment to either of the Egyptian giants, Al Ahly or Zamalek. In 2023, shortly after Benzema negotiated a deal with Al Ittihad, Liverpool rejected an offer from the same club. Salah, five years Benzema’s junior, wanted to prolong his career at the highest level and at Liverpool he became one of its greatest players.

There is an undefined list of legendary players and it has been argued by some of those who sit outside of it that Salah competes with Kenny Dalglish and Steven Gerrard right at the top. While Dalglish, once the team’s most natural talent, became a player-manager and created a side in his own image before acting as a father figure to grieving families following the Hillsborough disaster, Gerrard captained the club for longer than a decade and redefined what a local hero looked like, becoming the midfielder and leader that everyone has been judged against since. Dalglish and Gerrard, however, are generally thought of as representatives of one or two places, Liverpool as well as Glasgow, where Dalglish was raised. Salah commands much broader attention: as one of the most famous Muslim footballers that has ever been, Salah does not just speak for the area he comes from or even the country but a region and a religion — Islam is the second biggest in the world with an estimated two billion followers.

At a club with a history as rich as Liverpool’s, there is a tendency to look to the past in a search for answers about how the present and the future should look. This week, for example, Jamie Carragher compared Salah’s critique of Liverpool’s season, and by extension the head coach Arne Slot whose decision to drop him in December has led to his departure, to the contrasting reactions of Gerrard and Dalglish when they were either substituted or left out of the starting XI 30 years apart — neither turned on the manager.

Salah is ferociously independent and his decisions are informed by his experiences and very different level of status. Neither Gerrard nor Dalglish moved home from at an early age, firstly to a different part of a country and then to a new continent: quickly, Salah was at Chelsea, where he was involved in just 19 games across 12 months, learning all about player power and the consequences of sitting quietly in the corner. Whenever he has felt threatened since, as his fame has accelerated, he has attempted to do something about it, whether that be campaigning over a contract or confronting a manager or head coach, as he has done with Jurgen Klopp and Slot. Salah’s eminence yields power, but he did not set out to change the world and it has not formed part of his wider strategy. He and his representative, the Dubai-based lawyer Ramy Abbas, do not work with sponsors who are interested in him because of his faith. Abbas, of Lebanese background but raised in Colombia as a Catholic, identifies as an antitheist, which means he is consciously and deliberately opposed to the concept of any god. He insists that any partnership should be based on the player’s individuality as an international icon, rather than anything to do with where he comes from.

Abbas, who has officially been in charge of Salah’s off-field affairs since he signed a loan deal with Roma in 2015, wanted the player to control his identity rather than allow other forces to shape it for him. Abbas has concluded that campaigns around race or religion occupy spaces in the media for only a short period before they fall away. It is his opinion that across an increasingly polarised world, the public tended to look at celebrities in only one of two ways: those who elicit sympathy and those who seem invincible. In agreement with Abbas, Salah decided to leave sympathy for those who were really struggling. Salah and Abbas formed their own public relations strategy and for a long time, did not take advice from specialists. The pair accepted that critics would claim Salah should speak more about some issues but they agreed that his performances as a footballer were more powerful than words.

Abbas was particularly delighted to find out that Islamophobia decreased on Merseyside during the 2017-18 season when he scored 44 goals. On his advice, Salah did not speak about his faith once during the period, though he did celebrate occasionally by demonstrating the sujood, the Islamic act of prostration. Religion is a part of Salah’s identity but Abbas did not want it to define impressions of him. When one magazine proposed an interview and a photo shoot under a headline which suggested Salah was “The world’s favourite Muslim,” Abbas rejected the idea. Earlier, Abbas had been approached about Salah featuring in an article that wanted to explore the impact of the Manchester Arena attack on Muslims living in the United Kingdom. Islamic terrorists had killed twenty-two and injured more than a thousand people — Abbas made the case that he did not want his client occupying the same space as an extremist. He was also wary of Western outlets attempting to use Salah to promote their own diversity interests. If Muslims took inspiration from Salah, then fine, but he did not set out to appeal to them. His family photographs of Christmas celebrations, for example, was seen as blasphemous by some Muslims, with the charges ranging from claims he was trying too hard to assimilate and had pulled away from his humble background in the Nile Delta to suggestions he’d given up on Islam altogether and turned to Christianity.

Each year, in spite of criticism, Salah continued to celebrate Christmas with his family in Cheshire and publicised the occasion. Observant Muslims consider the action provocative and would like him to actively assert his faith yet Salah has rarely taken positions on issues he has been expected to, especially when they are more complicated. In 2023, a video released by Salah calling for an end to the bloodshed in Gaza received 200million views but according to some figures in the Islamic world, Salah did not speak quickly enough or use language that was decisive. Quietly, he had already made a substantial donation to a charity trying to supply aid. Salah often has to tread carefully because of Egypt’s place in the world and the politics that exist there, but he has also learned, in more ways than one, given his Instagram gym content, that showing your muscle sometimes works. He likes to think of himself as an inspiration and has asked people to follow their dreams, as he once did from the dusty village of Nagrig; but this is where his and Abbas’ views diverge: the lawyer believes that the message in some way reduces Salah’s achievements — that there is a reason why only he has been able to get to where he is and that, squarely, is because he is a one-off.