FeatureHow Mohamed Salah rewrote the record books at Liverpool

His new working environment – the Reds’ historic former training base – was potted with reminders of what the club had achieved in its 125 years of existence to that point.

Before Salah had fully passed through the building’s reception area, he was served with a rallying quote from Bill Shankly etched onto the wall.

To his left was an honours board of the trophies lifted by all those who had gone before him: 18 league titles and five European Cups to name only the headlines.

To his right, encased in a cabinet, stood a gleaming replica of the Champions League trophy, last collected by Liverpool on that crazy night in Istanbul in 2005.

The Premier League trophy, of course, was conspicuous by its absence, with the club’s drought on that front reaching a 27th year.

But wherever he walked from there, his eyes would continue to be drawn to homages for former players, the heroes on and off the pitch who built the Reds into the ‘bastion’ Shankly had dreamed of.

Intensely driven and supremely talented as he was, perhaps even Salah himself could not envisage on that day how much he would carve himself into the LFC fabric in the nine years that followed.

Within 12 months, the No.11 had delivered the second-most prolific season by a single player wearing Liverpool’s colours.

Nominally a wide forward, remember, Salah scored 44 times in all competitions in 2017-18 – threatening to topple the record 47 plundered by Ian Rush in 1983-84.

It also obliterated Fernando Torres’ benchmark for the most goals scored for the club in a debut season, zooming clear of the Spaniard’s 33 in 2007-08.

Planting his own name in or atop the lists of Reds history became a common occurrence, routinely forcing statisticians into extra homework on matchdays.

By October 2018, Salah had hit the landmark of 50 goals for the club, in by far the fewest number of appearances of any player in history.

A brace against Red Star Belgrade at Anfield took him to the half-century in his 65th match – comfortably eclipsing the record held by Albert Stubbins (77 games).

That campaign concluded with Salah and his teammates lifting the Champions League trophy in Madrid after a 2-0 defeat of Tottenham Hotspur.

The forward converted a penalty after just 108 seconds, the second-fastest opening goal in the competition’s final.

A year later – and with Salah part of the first Liverpool team ever to win the FIFA Club World Cup in between – there was Premier League glory to end a 30-year wait for the title to return to Anfield.

In July 2020, as that season concluded amid the COVID-19 pandemic, he became the quickest Red to 100 Premier League goal involvements, in just 104 outings.

Salah next edged out the legendary Roger Hunt for the feat of being the fastest man to rack up 100 goals for Liverpool in the top flight in September 2021.

In scoring versus Brentford on his 151st league appearance, he scooped ‘Sir’ Roger by just one game and grabbed hold of a record that had stood for 55 years.

That effort was the Egyptian’s 131st goal in total wearing the Liver bird, which took him into the club’s all-time top 10 scorers, a little over four years since his arrival.

A month later, he bagged an unforgettable hat-trick at Old Trafford as Jürgen Klopp’s men claimed a 5-0 victory over their rivals.

The first visiting player ever to net a treble on the ground in the Premier League, Salah was also the first Liverpool player to score three times away at Manchester United since Fred Howe in 1936.

His Reds career will conclude with him comfortably the club’s most prolific individual versus United – his 16 goals standing clear of Steven Gerrard’s nine.

In October of 2022-23, Salah helped himself to the record of quickest hat-trick scored in a Champions League fixture.

Having entered the clash with Rangers at Ibrox as a second-half substitute, he went on to hit the net three times in a period of just six minutes and 12 seconds.

Overall, Salah will depart the Reds having thoroughly etched his name into the club’s rich history in European football.

He tops the chart for the most European goals scored with 53 (a dozen more than Gerrard) and specifically the Champions League (48, clear of Gerrard’s 30).

During his ninth and final season at Anfield, the attacker also leapfrogged Ian Callaghan and Sami Hyypia to reach third place for most European appearances for Liverpool (95).

It was during the 2022-23 campaign that Salah hauled himself to the summit of the Reds’ list of top scorers in the Premier League.

Two goals in the 7-0 rout of United at Anfield moved him above Robbie Fowler (128).

That tally now stands at 191.

By creating a goal on his farewell appearance on Sunday, meanwhile, Salah moved past Gerrard for the most Premier League assists while representing the Reds, on 93.

Premier League-specific achievements have poured in with abnormal frequency for Salah, particularly during his magnificent 2024-25 performance.

To inspire Liverpool to the second championship of his time on Merseyside, he totalled a ridiculous 47 goal involvements (29 goals and 18 assists were each league highs) – a record for one player in a 38-game campaign.

He was also the division’s leading scorer and assister in 2021-22 (23 goals, 13 assists). Nobody else has ever done that twice.

There were 11 different league games in 2024-25 that saw Salah both score and assist, leaving the previous best figure of seven in the dust.

Overall, he did that trick of hitting the target and setting up a teammate on 42 occasions in the Premier League. Yes, of course, a record.

Yet another PL list he sits at the summit of is goal involvements for a single club: 284 for the Reds (191 goals, 93 assists) bettering Wayne Rooney’s 276 for Manchester United.

No-one has more Premier League Golden Boots than Salah’s four (level with Thierry Henry) or more Player of the Month wins (seven, equal with Sergio Aguero and Harry Kane).

His PFA Players’ Player of the Year honour in 2025 made him the first ever to receive it three times, having also done so in 2018 and 2022.

Salah was awarded FWA Footballer of the Year for those same three seasons, surpassing Kenny Dalglish (two) and John Barnes (two) for the most while at Liverpool.

2024-25 was the fifth season in which Salah brought up the 30-goal mark for the Reds across all competitions, matching Hunt and Rush for the most at the club.

Nobody in LFC history, however, can equal his streak of eight consecutive seasons scoring 20 goals or more, from 2017-18 to 2024-25, which surpassed Rush’s best run of six in a row.

Throughout the years, meanwhile, Salah steadily and surely rose up the list of all-time leading goalscorers in the Liverpool jersey.

His final movement came in March 2025 as he superseded Gordon Hodgson, and he will settle on 257, with only Rush (346) and Hunt (285) in front.

“I really want to succeed,” he recently explained of what drove him over the past near-decade. “I really want to be remembered in this club.”

Mission accomplished, Mo.