CHRIS SUTTON: Mo Salah IS the world's best player

CHRIS SUTTON: Mo Salah IS the world’s best player right now… so Liverpool must agree a new deal fast

• Mo Salah scored a fine goal and added an assist in a 5-0 thumping of Watford 
• The Egyptian has scored seven goals in just eight league matches this season
• Reds boss Jurgen Klopp questioned which other players were better than him

Mohamed Salah is currently the best footballer in the world. He’s better than Lionel Messi. Better than Cristiano Ronaldo. Better than Robert Lewandowski, Karim Benzema, Erling Haaland and whoever else you want to counter with.

They’re world-class players, all of them, but Salah is playing out of this world at the moment.

Where we see Premier League defenders, Salah sees those little orange cones that you use on the training field. He dances around them and scores — as we saw against Manchester City before the international break and as we saw against Watford.

Chris Sutton believes  Mohamed Salah (pictured) is currently the best in the world

Not only that, he is doing all of this in the most difficult league in the world, which should be taken into account when deciding who is the world’s best.

Kylian Mbappe scored a winner at the weekend, for example, but Ligue 1 doesn’t compare in terms of difficulty, whereas Salah has scored in seven of his eight Premier League games this season.

He’s always been up there, regarded as one of the world’s best. His numbers since signing for Liverpool warrant nothing less than that. They can make for silly reading. But now this season, he’s showing he’s the best.

While Messi and Ronaldo have dipped, and their grip on the debate over who’s the world’s best has loosened, the 29-year-old is getting stronger. This is the greatest version of Salah we’ve seen. And that’s saying something, considering in 2017-18 he scored 44 goals in 52 games.

He’s giving off vibes from the peak Messi era, as if he believes whatever he wants to do is inevitable. He’s making a mockery of that ‘expected goal’ statistic. He’ll get the ball, like he did against City, and like he did against Watford, and his xG in that moment will be something silly like 0.05, maybe lower. 

Salah scored an incredible solo goal and provided an assist against the Hornets on Saturday

And yet, he’ll score. He came out of those games with a couple of Goal of the Season contenders. Salah scored a similar one against Tottenham in February 2018, where he drove through traffic before burying the ball but he can score all manner of strikes. Like his vicious volley against Stoke in November 2017. Like his 25-yard swerver into the top corner against Chelsea in April 2019.

He skipped by David Luiz close to the halfway line in August 2019 to down Arsenal. He rounded the RB Salzburg goalkeeper Cican Stankovic in December that year to score from a seemingly impossible angle.

Liverpool need to tie Salah down to this new deal, as soon as. With each week that they don’t, they risk him doing something stupendous and adding another £50,000 to his wage! If Liverpool don’t act fast, Newcastle could swoop in (I’m joking… ish). But Jurgen Klopp may as well have been speaking directly to John W Henry when he was saying Salah is the best in the world. He’s right. He is.

And Liverpool should be doing all they can to keep hold of him.

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