Mo Salah spent a full 90 minutes on the bench as Liverpool lost 2-0 to Paris Saint-Germain on Wednesday, his third time being left out of Arne Slot’s lineup for an entire match.
The Egypt forward has now matched the total number of unused-substitute appearances he had under Jürgen Klopp, a mark he reached across just three games in the 2019-20 season. That is a striking shift for a player who produced 23 goals and 13 assists across all competitions that year and was rarely absent from Klopp’s plans.
Salah’s first spell as an unused substitute came in November 2019, when Liverpool went to Crystal Palace with Klopp concerned about his fitness after international duty and an ankle injury. Klopp said at the time: “Yesterday was the first session where everything was fine, but it was a bit late then, to be honest,” before leaving him on the bench again a few weeks later for the Merseyside derby against Everton.
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The contrast with this season is what has sharpened the scrutiny. Under Klopp, Salah was an unused substitute only three times in total. Under Slot, it has now happened three times already, and that has fueled speculation about tensions behind the scenes after Salah previously went public with a vicious attack on the Dutch manager after being benched for three straight games earlier in the campaign.
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Slot may argue that he was preserving Salah’s energy, but the decision to keep one of Liverpool’s defining attackers idle for a full Champions League night against Paris Saint-Germain invites a harder reading: this is no longer an occasional rotation decision, but a pattern that raises the biggest question around Liverpool’s run-in — how often Slot is prepared to leave his most decisive forward on the sideline when the stakes are highest.
