Liverpool have won 'stagnant league' but Salah still 'shoe-in' for Ballon d'Or

Liverpool winning the Premier League in February is a sign of dark, dark times, and yet Mo Salah is up there with Messi and Ronaldo. Go figure…

Total pith-head

Only the miserablist-for-money Barney Ronay could look at a Premier League table with Nottingham Forest in third and Bournemouth in sixth and pithily declare that this is all a bit dull and predictable.

‘So much for that excitingly bumpy, turbulence-fuelled Premier League season, all perky upstarts, crumbling certainties and unexpected shifts of altitude, which really did seem to be shaping up just a few short weeks ago.’

That’s all still happening, Barney. There are still two ‘perky upstarts’ in the top six, and Manchester United are literally in 15th. No f***er predicted any of this. This is only ‘premature entropy’ if all you care about is the Premier League title race and the easiest of Guardian page views.

‘We’ve got Liverpool. We have an encouragingly ambitious tier between third and eighth place. But we also haven’t had a proper three- or four-pronged title race for years.’

Obviously we cannot expect Ronay to remember as far back into the misty reaches of time as sepia-toned April 2024 when three teams entered the final six games of the season separated by two points. Is that not a ‘proper three-pronged title race’? As for four-pronged, Mediawatch suspects that might have last happened in 1972. We refuse to set that particular straw man on fire.

Lost in this ‘woe is football’ navel-gazing is the fact that Manchester City’s last three titles have been won by two, five and one point(s). The title race being over in February is an anomaly, not the continuation of a worrying pattern.

So when he writes that ‘the Premier League does seem to have found an unexpected solution to fixture overload, player fatigue and the dilution of the spectacle. Too many games? Just end the season as a contest in February and play out three months of semi-exhibition stuff’, realise that he is basically saying that this season’s title race is over rather sooner than we all expected.

Does that make this a ‘stagnant league’? Does that mean that there should be a ‘cap on salaries, even more rigorous transfer spending rules, incentives to build and produce a team rather than conjure one out of the fire, with the aim always of invigorating competitive balance’?

After all, Forest and Bournemouth might argue that the ‘competitive balance’ has been really quite ‘invigorating’, thank you.

The big question: How has Ronay written a treatise on a ‘stagnant league’ without once mentioning the name of the club in third who last season finished in 17th? It’s almost like it doesn’t fit his lazy agenda.

Salah days

Mo Salah might be the current favourite to win the 2025 Ballon d’Or but it is classic English exceptionalism to think that he is somehow nailed on for the award. Or a ‘shoe-in’ as Richard Keys writes on his blog.

Oh the irony of Keys raging against ‘the arrogance of so-called experts that live and work within the borders of the U.K. who think nothing beyond their territory matters’ and then suggesting Salah somehow has the Ballon d’Or sewn up.

Over at the Liverpool Echo – who can of course be trusted for an objective view on this subject – Mark Wakefield writes that ‘if Salah continues his current form until the end of the season, it would be one of the biggest shocks if he was not to win the Ballon d’Or this year’.

If Salah continues his current form and Liverpool win the Champions League, it would indeed be one of the biggest shocks. But should Liverpool only win the Premier League – and Real Madrid win the Champions League as well as Liga – it would be an almighty shock if Salah still won. It would be pretty much unprecedented.

The only two players who have won the Ballon d’Or in recent history without winning either the Champions League or a major international trophy are Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. That is one very exclusive club of which Salah is not a member.

Two seasons ago Erling Haaland scored a ludicrous 52 goals as Manchester City won the Treble and he still missed out to Messi; Thierry Henry was undoubtedly the best player in the Premier League for several seasons and still did not win the Ballon d’Or.

Jack Flintham of the Echo adds: ‘If Los Blancos were to win the Champions League and La Liga, I don’t think Salah will stand a chance of winning the coveted award. The shame is that a lot of weight will be added to the winner of that competition if Liverpool aren’t victorious, I can see Vinicius Jr or one of his teammates mopping up.’

It really is a ‘shame’ indeed that weight will be added to the winners of the competition to find Europe’s best team rather than just handing the award to Salah because he has scored the most goals in the Premier League.

But as we discovered in Monday’s Mediawatch, Salah is setting and breaking all manner of records that are mostly just statistics.

Oliver Brown of the Daily Telegraph has been busy reading such statistics on X, proclaiming: ‘Consider this: Salah has scored and assisted in 49 different league matches across Europe’s top five divisions. The only others to share that distinction? Yes, you guessed it, Messi and Ronaldo.’

This, apparently, means he has ‘staked a claim to be sculpted into the game’s Mount Rushmore, with Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo’.

Sorry but for that kind of billing, we would expect a 32-year-old to have claimed more than one Premier League and one Champions League trophy.

We could genuinely name about 20 better players from the last 20 years, but Xavi and Andres Iniesta might want a particularly sharp word.

Brown continues: ‘The barely believable reality is that his 41 league “goal involvements”, as goals and assists are fashionably packaged, have been worth 34 points to his club this campaign. Without them, Liverpool would be in the same position in the table as Everton: 14th. Instead, they are carrying the billing of champions-elect, 11 points clear of Arsenal, with their coronation come May almost a fait accompli. Across all competitions, he has had 51 goal involvements.’

‘Barely believable’? It’s just bollocks, fella. This is not how football works and it really is the most reductive nonsense.

Brown’s piece is headlined ‘Mohamed Salah is delivering the greatest season in Premier League history’, which is odd when you remember Haaland’s Treble-winning feats of just two years ago, when the Chief Sports Writer of the Telegraph (one Oliver Brown) wrote that ‘Haaland has the perspective to recognise that his absurd goal tallies are little more than ego trips without the trophies to match’.

And yet here we are two years later, claiming that the debate is ‘where Salah’s season ranks among the greatest ever produced by a single player‘ without once mentioning Haaland, a man who definitely matched the ‘ego trips’ with trophies.

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