“Mo Sa-la-la-la-lah. If he's good enough for you, he's good enough for me. If he scores another few, then I'll be Muslim too. Sitting in a mosque – that's where I wanna be.”
Those words have echoed from the Kop End for the last eight years, sung in pubs, on terraces, in the town centre by fans who couldn't tell you the difference between sujud and shahada. But somehow, in the noise and heat of English football, they have become a mainstay at one of the biggest and most decorated clubs in the country.
After nine years, two Premier League titles, three EFL Cup trophies, a Champions League, FA Cup, FIFA Club World Cup, UEFA Super Cup, a Community Shield, and genuinely countless individual accolades, Mohamed Salah has played his final game for Liverpool.
I hate to admit it, but we may not see another player sustain this level of quality for this long anytime soon. There are, of course, names that come to mind, but that’s for another piece, for another day.
Salah's departure from Liverpool has long been a topic of intense, often impassioned discussion, sweeping not just the ever-faithful, ever-in-chorus Kop End – for whom the Egyptian captain has defined an era of transformation on Merseyside – but across the entire football world. A legend in every sense of the word, bowing out one last time.
And within all the titles, records, goals and assists, his legacy goes far beyond any trophy cabinet, beyond just the boundaries of Anfield, into something that permeates below the surface: Islamophobia in Britain, and how one of the country’s predominantly white, working-class cities related to its Muslim neighbours.
At a moment when anti-Muslim rhetoric and far-right activism are once again becoming increasingly visible in Britain, Salah’s cultural impact beyond the pitch feels difficult to ignore.
Salah’s arrival in Liverpool came to the tune of £34 million (~AU$64 million) in the summer of 2017; modest by today's eye-watering standards, but crucially, at a time when one of England’s most successful clubs had spent the better part of a decade failing to live up to its own fabled legacy.
Jürgen Klopp had arrived in 2015 with a manifesto to play fast, aggressive, suffocating football built on collective pressing and ferocious intensity (a style the German called Gegenpressing). Simply put, he had to return Liverpool to the top of English football.
In his debut campaign, Salah scored 32 goals and provided 10 assists in the Premier League alone, breaking Alan Shearer, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Luis Suárez's long-standing single-season goals record. It was the first of four Premier League Golden Boots for Liverpool’s new hero.
But it was a year later, in 2018, when the Egyptian forward – a devout Muslim who pressed his forehead to the turf every time he scored, who fasted during Ramadan, who named his daughter after Islam's holiest city – became the 13th player in Liverpool's 125-year history to score 30 goals in a season. And the Kop started to sing.
As with all good English football chants, the song that rang around Anfield that day was set (rather appropriately) to the tune of Good Enough, a 1990s Britpop hit by Dodgy.
“Mo Sa-la-la-la-lah. If he's good enough for you, he's good enough for me. If he scores another few, then I'll be Muslim too. Sitting in a mosque – that's where I wanna be.”
A year later, a peer-reviewed study published in the American Political Science Review took hate crime data from 25 police forces across England and 15 million tweets from British football fans.
It found that, after Salah joined Liverpool, hate crimes in Merseyside fell by 16% compared to a statistical control group. Drug crime rose in the same period. Violent crime was unchanged. Only hate crime fell, and only in the area where the Egyptian King played his football.
Anti-Muslim tweets posted by Liverpool fans were cut in half. In a survey of over 8,000 supporters, simply being shown a picture of Salah performing his post-goal prostration made respondents measurably more likely to say Islam was compatible with British values.
This weekend, as the 2025/26 season comes to an end for another year, Mo Salah walked out onto Anfield for one last time. He walked through a guard of honour, organised by his teammates, and met by Kenny Dalglish and Ian Rush – Liverpool royalty paying tribute to the Egyptian King.
“We put it back where it belonged,” Salah said. Of course, the Liverpool legend was speaking about the Club and the journey they’ve taken together. But he could have easily been speaking about the city of Liverpool as a whole. Or the idea that football, when it works the way it worked here, can be a profoundly consequential vehicle for change.
We’ll all remember Salah for the goals, but his story will always be one that challenged assumptions and prejudice; a lasting legacy that, in the end, was much bigger than football.
