A point is all that’s required, and should Liverpool achieve the draw or victory necessary against Tottenham Hotspur to seal their English Premier League title, and do so at a full Anfield on Sunday, it will not be long before the next targets come into view. Retaining the title, above all. The summit of English football is a notorious hard place to pitch a lasting flag, unless you are Manchester City.
Nor is it common for any team to win the Premier League with four matches to spare, as Liverpool can against Spurs, and although a wide margin of superiority is no reliable guide to a team’s prospects of retaining the prize the next season, the champions-elect have re-armed themselves for 2025/26 in the best way possible. Mohamed Salah, whose future had looked uncertain until he signed a new contract earlier this month, will be part of their title defence.
He will likely be carrying a sackful of new individual honours. Salah is on course to be the highest goalscorer in England’s top division for the fourth time, an award he twice shared in the past but should claim outright again. He has already set a Premier League record, in the era of 38-match seasons, for the number of goal contributions in a single campaign, his 18 assists – alongside his 27 goals – a soaring statement of Salah’s all-round effectiveness as an attacking phenomenon. “I think it’s been my best season because I am making the players around me better as well,” Salah told TNT Sports.
Salah also leads the race for the European Golden Shoe, given to the top marksman in league football in Europe. He is ahead of seasoned centre-forwards Robert Lewandowski and Harry Kane, whose Barcelona and Bayern Munich are favourites to win the Spanish and German leagues respectively, and of Victor Gyokeres, whose 34 goals for Lisbon club Sporting have a lower Golden Shoe points ranking because the Portuguese league is deemed less demanding than England, Spain or Germany’s top flight.
As for the sport’s most prestigious individual award, the men’s Ballon d’Or, Salah’s candidacy has never looked stronger. The main arguments against his becoming the first Arab holder of the prize, which will be awarded in the autumn on the basis of performances in the 2024/25 season, would seem to hang largely on how far his rivals might trump him in terms of the number and lustre of club trophies they collect in the months ahead.
It is a lively joust to succeed Rodri, the City midfielder who pipped an angry Vinicius Junior, or Real Madrid, to the 2024 Ballon d’Or. Rodri has spent most this season injured – and how City have missed him – so there’s no possibility of his keeping the prize. But one of his Spain teammates might. Lamine Yamal has been inspiring for Barcelona in their chase for a possible treble.
So not least of the intrigues around the 2025 Ballon d’Or is that the podium may well feature two dazzling wingers, one of them twice the age of the other. Salah turns 33 in mid-June, when Yamal will still be 17.
Lewandowski, 36, will also be in the conversation should Barca sweep to major domestic or indeed Uefa Champions League honours, with the possibility that some of the voting panel – football journalists from each of the 100 top-ranked Fifa nations – are moved to reward Lewandowski’s enduring excellence by recalling the Pole was the favourite to win the 2020 Ballon d’Or – a year that, because of the Covid pandemic, no winner was declared.
But the narrow favourite, as the season enters its decisive phase, would seem to be Raphinha, whose superb finishing and penetrating runs on the left of Barcelona’s de luxe forward line has driven the Catalan club’s high-scoring, attractive bid for a treble. This weekend could see the first of their major prizes sealed, when Barca take on Real Madrid in the Copa del Rey final.
Barca also lead Madrid, the defending Spanish champions, in the race for La Liga, four points ahead with a potential pivotal clasico to come on May 11. And unlike Madrid, or Liverpool, Barcelona remain in contention for the European Cup, with a semi-final against Italy’s Inter Milan to negotiate, starting in Catalonia next Wednesday.
And team trophies count for a great deal in the Ballon d’Or voting. However impressively Salah has driven Liverpool to first place in the Premier League, they are not involved in the FA Cup, whose semi-finals take place this weekend, nor in the Uefa Champions League, having been eliminated on penalties by Paris Saint-Germain in the last 16.
PSG, who meet Arsenal for a place in the European Cup final, have their own strong candidate for the Ballon d’Or. Ousmane Dembele’s goalscoring – he has 32 club goals, across competitions this term, the same as Salah – and maturity as leader of the forward line have meant the club barely missed Kylian Mbappe, who left Paris for Madrid last July. And there’s another possible team prize for PSG. They are in the Club World Cup, this June and July, while Liverpool and Barcelona are not.
All that may count against Salah. “Someone who wins the Ballon d’Or needs to win something else [a major team trophy] as well,” observes Arne Slot, the Liverpool manager, highlighting Salah’s broader, less visible credentials – like his “oustanding defensive work-rate” off the ball – and pointing out that Rodri last season “only won the league and not the Champions League.”
However, Rodri had helped lead Spain to triumph in last summer’s European Championship, a success that counted in his favour in a tight vote, a vote that second-placed Vinicius found so disappointing that his club, Real Madrid, boycotted the 2024 presentation ceremony.
“With the Ballon d’Or, everybody knows there’s sometimes ‘stuff’ involved,” smiled Salah when he was asked about the machinations around the prize. A new system of voting, introduced last year, allows the voters to submit 10 names, awarding 15 points to their top choice down to one point for their 10th. The player with the highest total collated points wins. Real Madrid last year felt miffed that, because so many of their double-winning players featured high in the rankings – Jude Bellingham was third, Dani Carvajal fourth – it seemed plausible that votes that might otherwise have gone to Vinicius were spread around his colleagues.
Barcelona might imagine the same could happen to Raphinha, Lamine and Lewandowski. Salah will appreciate that his Liverpool colleague Virgil van Dijk will pick up votes this time around, although it is very rare indeed that a defender wins the Ballon d’Or. “It’s mostly about attackers,” noted Slot.
Nor is there a major international tournament to consider, as there was for Rodri, and when Lionel Messi collected his eighth Ballon d’Or for the year that included Argentina’s 2022 World Cup victory. Salah has a first Africa Cup of Nations in his sights, having twice finished as a losing Afcon finalist with Egypt, but the next finals start in December, a tournament that, along with next summer’s World Cup, will fall under the remit of the 2026 Ballon d’Or. Salah, the superstar who seems to get better with age, intends to be in that conversation, too.
