In his last game before AFCON, Mohamed Salah put on a classic Liverpool show. If you don’t count being superhuman, this Premier League star is the most like Lionel Messi.

Could it be that Mohamed Salah still doesn’t get the he deserves? It’s possible to sound like Michael Owen, the great Liverpool striker who said Christmas was “underrated.”

That being said, Salah will definitely get the praise he deserves at Liverpool. That being said, it still feels like his greatness is sometimes played down outside of Anfield.

In the summer of 2022, the BBC asked people to vote for the best Premier League team of all time. Alan Shearer, Thierry Henry, and Cristiano Ronaldo came out on top, leaving Salah out of the list. The second one is becoming more and more unfair, since the Egyptian has done much better at Liverpool than Lionel Messi’s main rival did for Manchester United.

The argument over whether Ronaldo or Messi was better would, of course, last for a long time after Ronaldo moved to Real Madrid. But Salah is stuck between that group and the next wave of stars, which has made it harder for him to get noticed.

That’s very clear on stages like the Ballon d’Or. Salah’s success mostly comes from how consistent he is, so he doesn’t always have seasons with ridiculously high numbers like Messi does. That one time, in 2017/18, the Jürgen Klopp project was still very new, and a fourth-place league win wasn’t good enough for sixth because the award was mostly given to World Cup stars. In recent years, he has done best when ranked fifth.

When Salah joined Liverpool, he made the Ballon d’Or group every single season. That says a lot. If there was a prize for the same thing given over five years, he would definitely be in the running because no one else can match his steady work.

In fact, now that Messi has moved to the MLS, Salah is the only player in Europe who can compete with him. Some people would rather compare him to the retired Eden Hazard as a Premier League player, but the Liverpool legend has a lot in common with the game’s all-time great.

Both players don’t fit neatly into one category. Though both are technically right wingers, they don’t fit neatly into any of the normal categories. They’re not just explosive one-on-one specialists, wide playmakers, or goal scorers.