Trying To Make Sense Of Salah Being Dropped

Salah being taken out of the Liverpool side never really felt like a straightforward football call to me. The timing was odd, the context was odd, and when you look at who kept their places, it raises more questions than it answers.

Why Drop Him Just As He Looked Brighter?

What nags at me is that Salah actually seemed to be picking up a bit when he was taken out of the team. In that spell, especially in the Aston Villa game and the Real Madrid win, he looked a touch sharper, a bit more involved, like he was edging back towards himself.

So why is that the moment you decide to drop him? If a player is clearly stinking the place out for weeks, you can at least see the logic, even if you disagree. But this felt like the opposite. It was as if, just as he started to turn a tiny corner, he was suddenly gone from the XI.

And this wasn’t happening in a side that was flying either. The whole team looked off it. The performances weren’t exactly screaming that everyone bar Salah deserved their place nailed down.

Others Struggling, Yet Only Salah Sits

That’s the second big thing for me. There were plenty of other lads who looked just as poor, if not worse, than Salah in that period. Konate, Macca, Gakpo, VVD, Kerkez, Isak – all had games where they looked miles off it. Yet they all pretty much stayed in the side.

So why was Salah the only one properly taken out of the firing line? If the whole team looks ropey in a particular system, I’ve always felt that points more to the system than to one individual. When everyone dips together, it usually means something is broken structurally: the press is off, the distances are wrong, the transitions are slow. You don’t fix that by just binning one forward.

Singling out Salah in that context just doesn’t sit right. It doesn’t feel like consistent management. It feels like there was something extra at play.

Footballing Call Or Something Bigger?

That’s why my head keeps going back to the idea that this might not have been purely about form or tactics. If I’m trying to join the dots, it makes more sense to me that the club could have been edging towards moving him on and this was part of that process, done quietly in the background rather than out in the open.

To be clear, I’ve got no hard proof of that. All I really have to go on is my own reading of the situation and what Ed001 has said. But when I compare the two explanations – one being that he was simply out of form and didn’t suit the system, the other being that there might have been an agenda to phase him out – the second one honestly feels like it lines up better with how it all played out.

Maybe there are things behind the scenes we’ll never know about, and maybe there is a perfectly innocent football reason. Right now though, from the outside looking in, the whole Salah decision still feels like a story with a few missing pages.

Written by Dracred: 14 December 2025