Djimi Traore cites ‘insane’ reason which could plausibly explain Mo Salah’s goalscoring decline

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It’s hard to play that high intensity game when you start to get old.“Mo Salah is a legend for Liverpool. When you sit with the top players, when you play in a big club and you can play more than 75 games a year or something like that, I think it’s crazy.“The demand is higher than before.

You play every three days when you play in the Champions League, when you play in the league, and if you play for your national team as well. It’s hard to play at the same intensity all the time.

You need to give the chance to some young players.”Salah has barely paused for breath over the past nine yearsSalah is renowned for his incredible durability – according to Transfermarkt, he’s been injured for only 20 games for club and country since joining Liverpool in June 2017 – and he’s been going almost non-stop throughout that time.On top of the intensity of Premier League football and annual European commitments, the winger has also partaken in a World Cup and four different AFCONs with Egypt in his time as a Reds player, and the sheer volume of minutes he’s racked up over the past nine years is extraordinary. That’s equal to 673.5 hours, or just over 28 days when condensed into a single enormous chunk.In that context, that it’s only taken until this season for that incomprehensible workload to finally catch up with him is remarkable, and even though he’s on course to play fewer minutes than usual in the current campaign, he’s still been a near-automatic starter under Arne Slot.(Photo by George Wood/Getty Images)The burning question is whether his 2025/26 figures are merely a statistical anomaly, or the beginning of a sustained decline after so many years of excelling at the highest level.The Liverpool head coach has been slow to trust in Federico Chiesa over the past 18 months, so we can expect Salah to start the majority of games from now until the end of May.