Steven Gerrard on Replacing Mohamed Salah: A Tough Challenge
Steven Gerrard knows what it looks like when a giant leaves Anfield. He’s lived it. So when he talks about the scale of replacing Mohamed Salah, there’s no sense of sugar-coating.
Trying to swap out Salah like-for-like? That, he says, is close to impossible.
Speaking on talkSPORT Breakfast, the former Liverpool captain laid out the problem with brutal clarity. There are very few wide forwards in world football who can come close to Salah’s blend of goals, assists and reliability. One of the rare names he did float was Michael Olise – but even that came with an immediate caveat: he doesn’t expect Bayern to let him go.
Gerrard’s point, though, wasn’t about one name. It was about a pattern.
When Liverpool lost Sadio Mané, they didn’t go hunting for a clone. They moved for Luis Díaz, a different type of winger with a different profile. When Luis Suárez left, the club again reshaped the attack rather than trying to rebuild the same player in another body. Systems shifted, roles tweaked, the frontline evolved.
That, Gerrard stressed, is where his confidence lies. In the process, not the panic.
Liverpool’s recruitment team, he argued, will already have a range of options on the table, and they won’t be fixated on a direct replica of Salah. What they cannot avoid, though, is the cold arithmetic of output. Salah’s goals and assists have underpinned Liverpool’s success for years. Those numbers, or something close to them, must be found again from somewhere else.
And that is where the conversation keeps circling back to Olise – even if Bayern want no part of it.
The Bundesliga club have moved quickly to shut down the noise. Internally, the message is blunt: they did not bring the Frenchman to Germany to cash in after two seasons, and they are not about to weaken a squad built to compete at the very top for the sake of a balance sheet.
Honorary president Uli Hoeness set the tone last month when asked about the Liverpool links. He dismissed the idea that Bayern would help rescue a struggling season at Anfield by handing over one of their most gifted attackers. Bayern, he reminded everyone, are in this for trophies and for their vast fanbase, not to stack money while the team on the pitch suffers.
The stance from the sporting department has been just as firm. Sporting director Max Eberl underlined that Olise is tied to the club until 2029 and, crucially, has no release clause. Bayern, he said, are “relaxed” about the situation – a word that, in transfer language, usually means: don’t bother calling.
So Liverpool find themselves in familiar territory: braced for the possible departure of a superstar, linked with an elite replacement, and staring at a brick wall of resistance from the selling club.
Gerrard, though, has seen this movie before. For him, the story at Anfield has rarely been about the one that got away. It’s been about what comes next.
