(CNN)Still only 29, he's one of the two greatest Premier League players of all-time, yet is Mohamed Salah still undervalued?
According to leading sports scientist Simon Brundish, it's a categorical yes -- and he's got the statistics to prove it.
In 1999, a swaggering Frenchman by the name of Thierry Henry arrived at Arsenal from Juventus. Over the next eight years, Henry would forge his name as one of the most feared forwards in the history of the game, forming the jewel in the crown of a glittering Gunners side that wrote themselves into the history books with an unbeaten league campaign in the 2003-04 season.
Eighteen years later, Mo Salah followed Henry's path in swapping Italy for England -- this time to Liverpool's benefit.
The Egyptian has scored over 100 times in just four seasons since his move from Roma, spearheading the club's sixth Champions League triumph in 2019 and a first league title win in three decades the following year.
That number of goals is even more remarkable given Salah usually operates from wide positions, rather than as a central striker like Chelsea's Romelu Lukaku.
"I think as a player in the Premier League, he is unprecedented," said Brundish of CNN Sport.
"The nearest we have of him is Thierry Henry, but by the time he was at Salah's age, he'd already moved to central striker -- up until 23, he sometimes played from the left.
"Henry might be the other most undervalued, underrated footballer in the Premier League's history with Salah."
Ballon d'Or worthy?
With six goals in his first seven games, Salah has had a customarily prolific start to Liverpool's 2021/22 league campaign.
His stunning solo goal in the 2-2 draw with reigning champion Manchester City earlier this month epitomized the Egyptian's brilliance -- jinking past multiple sky blue shirts before rifling a fierce drive, on his weaker right foot, past Ederson from the tightest of angles.
Last Friday saw the announcement of the men's Ballon d'Or shortlist, with Salah among the 30 nominees for football's foremost individual accolade. The Ballon d'Or ceremony takes place in Paris on November 29.
Despite a 32-goal, Golden Boot-winning league campaign in his debut Liverpool season and his efforts since, Salah has never made the podium for the award -- a fact that baffles Brundish -- though the sports scientist believes the forward is on course to avenge any previous injustice this season.
"I think if he carries on like this, there's no argument," Brundish said.
"I don't think there's anybody that's having anything like the season that he is currently having. If Liverpool have a good run in Europe -- they generally tend to be good at the European thing -- and win one of the league title or the Champions League, I think he has the momentum.
"I think he should have won it in 2017/18, he was the best player on the planet that year. The caveat to that is Messi was the best player on the planet because he's always the best player on the planet until he's not breathing, but Salah was the best performing player."
Deep diving into the stats
The numbers give credence to Brundish's analysis -- 152 league games played for Liverpool, 101 goals and 36 assists. These are not the sort of statistics that need quantifying or additional explanation to show Salah's greatness, and yet Brundish arrives with extra receipts anyway.
Reference is made to analytic metrics known as expected goals and expected assists -- data that effectively measures the likelihood of shots and final passes ending in goals. A value is generated between zero and one to quantify the likelihood of a goal for each action: zero being impossible to score and one being a certain goal.
Expected goals (xG) takes into account variables such as the shot angle and distance from the goal, while expected assists (xA) is similarly based upon factors like where the pass was made from and where the scorer initially received the ball.
Taking Salah's goal against Liverpool as an example, Curtis Jones would be awarded a relatively low xA figure for his short pass to the Egyptian that immediately preceded the goal, given Salah's distance out and the number of City defenders in his path.
Similarly, taking into account the acute angle of Salah's finish, the xG assigned to his shot would have been small compared to an open shot from the center of the box.
'Overperforming' xG - scoring a bigger number of objectives than the aggregated anticipated number - can demonstrate a significant degree of completing capacity, something that Salah has as of now shown this season by an overperformance of 1.14 xG across his initial seven association matches.
For Brundish, this is a "critical" sign of Salah's gifts and goes with a scope of different insights in measuring his worth - just Manchester City's Belgian midfielder Kevin de Bruyne approaches.
"Salah has the best season in Premier League history, clearly in 17/18, yet since 17/18, he's made the most possibilities by anyone not called De Bruyne," Brundish said.
"He has played more passes into the case, made more xA, all the more once in a lifetime opportunities, conveyed the ball into the case, had more punishment box contacts - so he's conveyed the ball and got the ball in the crate more than any other individual.
"Also, he's made more post-shot xG - the worth of what occurs after the shot. He's additional the most to that shot of anyone in the association over the most recent four years.
"At present this season, Mo Salah has an objective or help at regular intervals, and he had an objective or help like clockwork in his first season for Liverpool.
"So you can't decide by objectives and helps, however in case we're going to, just Thierry Henry has a superior pace of objectives and helps than Mo Salah in Premier League history of anyone that is scored 50 objectives.
"Close by that, he's missed two games through injury. That is a ludicrous degree of significant worth. De Bruyne is the main player in the association that could be contended is comparable to Salah, however he's missed 38 games during that period. It doesn't make any difference in case you're that acceptable in the event that you don't play."
Is Salah underestimated then, at that point?
It appears to be incomprehensible that a player with such a pile of measurable proof to support his capacity could be misjudged but, Brundish attests, that is actually the situation.
Having worked with different Premier League clubs, Brundish accepts that Salah is massively valued among individual players. Anyway in standard games media, the people who "set the story," credit is frequently quickly followed by analysis.
"There's consistently a 'Definitely, but...' with Salah," Brundish said. "They generally discover motivation to say, 'Definitely, yet he's narrow minded,' 'Better believe it, yet he doesn't buckle down.' Sadio Mane [Salah's teammate] would get all the more profoundly appraised by the intellectuals who set the account, however genuinely, they're not equivalent.
"One is a record-breaking extraordinary, and the other is a splendid footballer however he's not an unsurpassed incredible, and we've horribly minimized him."
The 'self centered' and 'lethargic' names coordinated at Salah are thorns that Brundish observes to be especially exasperating. For a researcher whose whole work spins around the utilization of information to make and support ends, it is "enormously irritating."
"You can't be that narrow minded while likewise making a larger number of opportunities for your partners than anyone in the association," Brundish said.
"This isn't 'now and again he makes possibilities' - he's in reality more liberal than any other person in the entire association. So you can't utilize those accounts - they can't exist simultaneously - one isn't right and it's been brought up more than once.
"'He doesn't function admirably hard.' Well, genuinely, he has more last third presses than anyone in Europe. He has the most last third ball recuperations than anyone in Europe.
"He does those persevering things that you will permit an awful player to accomplish in the event that they buckle down in light of the fact that you know, 'Our collaboration,' and he is likewise the best footballer in the association as well.
"You've gotten to the meaningful part where you're either excessively sluggish such that you're not ready to acknowledge anything unique or you're lying, and neither sits very well with me."
Media and public discernment
Part of Brundish's disappointment comes from his conviction that such reactions accompany undertones that lead to verifiable negative presumptions in regards to Salah's person.
"At the point when you're utilizing language like childish, that is disparaging, so you're making an analysis, however it likewise drives your mind down a specific way," Brundish clarifies.
"What's the significance here? It implies he doesn't pass, he isn't liberal, and he will settle on terrible decisions for his very own benefit. In England, that is nothing to joke about in light of the fact that we have these entirely horrible old practices that coarseness - giving for the group - what is unquestionably significant."
This reference to the standards at the core of English football, how it sees itself, structure the premise of Brundish's clarification regarding why such reactions of Salah rose, and continued, until as of late.
"There is consistently a tad of xenophobia," he contends.
"England's better, England's better, the Premier League's better, he was unable to do that on a chilly, wet evening, in Stoke sort of thing. For anyone that is not English, until they've been in England for a set period - I don't have a clue what that length is - there is certainly a degree of commonality when abruptly they become 'our own.'
"[Cristiano] Ronaldo had that, and Thierry Henry sort of had it by the end - you certainly find that with unfamiliar players.
"There was continually something pestering ceaselessly, 'There should be some kind of problem with him, since he can't be this acceptable.' It was practically similar to a slight on their judgment that he was refuting them.
"I was somewhat frightened by it, and I have been intended for three or four years. However something changed over the most recent three weeks where they are presently discussing him as perhaps he may really be elite all things considered. I think possibly it's simply his fifth year, it very well may be really that straightforward."
Brundish additionally accepts that Salah's underlying 'dismissal' from English football, wherein he was purchased by Chelsea from Roma in 2014 and sold by director Jose Mourinho two years after the fact, added to the school of Salah-doubters.
"Salah had the tradition of being dismissed by one of 'our outsiders' - Mourinho," Brundish clarified.
"It resembled, if Mourinho didn't believe he's sufficient - Mourinho is the best director ever to us as the media intellectuals - then, at that point, there should be an off-base thing."
Luckily for Salah, he without a doubt has the full sponsorship of his present director, Jurgen Klopp.
"Mo Salah scores that objective since he is elite," Klopp said after the Manchester City game.
"He is probably the best player on the planet. That is the way it is."
Source. CNN
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