Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp has asserted that Mohamed Salah won’t be too bothered by competition from fellow teammate Darwin Nunez and Manchester City striker Erling Haaland for the Premier League golden boot. As a new rivalry is ready to ensue between Nunez and Haaland, fans believe Salah’s goal-scoring run could be hampered by it.
However, Klopp feels that the three-time Premier League golden boot winner wold emulate his goal-scoring exploits as usual despite the arrivals of Nunez and Haaland. Liverpool landed Darwin Nunez in a club-record transfer which saw them pay £85 million to Benfica for the striker. Whereas City emerged as the winners to acquire the in-demand Erling Haaland from Borussia Dortmund for a mere £51 million.
Klopp feels Mohamed Salah could once again breach the 30-goal mark in the league
Mohamed Salah has been the goal scoring leader of Liverpool since he joined them in 2017 from Roma. The winger has so far racked up 118 goals in the Premier League, failing to reach 20+ mark only once in last five seasons. Salah has also collected three golden boots in the process for the 2017/18, 18/19 and 21/22 seasons.
Moreover, he did so with a whopping 32 goals in the 17/18 season and Klopp believes he could repeat the feat next season. Talking to the press ahead of Liverpool’s opening league game against Fulham, Klopp was asked whether Salah will double his efforts to bag goals post the arrivals of Nunez and Haaland to which he replied:
“Maybe but that is just talk, you should not think all the things you make up as a story are immediately important to us. New strikers are coming. In Germany when Robert Lewandowski left, [the talk was]: ‘Who will be the new goalscorer?’ That is what they discussed.
“I don’t know, people are motivated by different things, I think Mo’s biggest motivation is to win football games and to score, that is definitely the case. I don’t think he thinks too often about other players or how often they score. He might do it in May when he has hopefully 34 or 35 and the other two have 32. Before then I can’t see that.”
The German further expressed his feelings over Mohamed Salah extending his stay at the Anfield till the summer of 2025. Salah had just one year left on his contract and was stalling on an extension. However, he eventually commit to a new deal much to relief of Klopp.
“It is of course much better than if we would have been out of contract next summer. Mo [Salah] would have been the same person, I am 100 per cent sure he could have pushed that aside, but you would not stop asking and that is the problem we constantly face,” said Klopp.
“You asked me how he was in training and it’s because ‘ah, the contract’. You ask the players and they say ‘yesterday he was all right’ but these things help, yes. It helps much better to know exactly as much as possible about the season after rather than one year, but in the year itself it is not that relevant.”
He further cited the examples of the players he has worked with who displayed absolute professionalism when it came to contract situation.
“I have worked with players in that and not seen it one day and I, as a player, would have been more influenced by this fact that I don’t know where I am next year than these players were.
“It was Gini [Georginio Wijnaldum], Emre Can, it was [Robert] Lewandowski at Dortmund, these boys are real professionals, but we live in a world where everything is important and you have questions all the time and you give an answer and then you think about it and that is different because we all know exactly where we all will be.”
Klopp will be now looking to unleash his attack of Mohamed Salah, Darwin Nunez and Luis Diaz against Fulham. However, he still has a lot of injury issues to deal with opening the door for more signings.