Erling Haaland’s presence at Manchester City is not expected to have an impact on Mohamed Salah’s Premier League goal total according to Jurgen Klopp, and the Liverpool manager is optimistic that Salah will surpass 35 goals this season.
The Egyptian star shared the Golden Boot with Tottenham forward Son Heung-min last season after scoring 23 goals in the English Premier League.
However, after Darwin Nunez joined Liverpool’s roster this summer and goal machine Haaland was signed by City, the 30-year-old may have even greater competition for the division’s top scorer title in the 2022–23 season.
📺 Jurgen Klopp on Mo Salah/Erling Haaland:
“I don’t think he thinks too often about other players or how often they score. He might do it in May when he has hopefully 34 or 35 and the other two [Haaland and Nunez] have 32.” 🔴 pic.twitter.com/FixL5WmjuI
— Anfield Watch (@AnfieldWatch) August 5, 2022
What is Klopp’s take on Salah?
When asked if the arrivals of Haaland and Darwin Nunez would push Salah to score more goals, Klopp said, “Maybe but that is just talk, you should not think all the things you make up as a story are immediately important to us.
“New strikers are coming. In Germany when Robert Lewandowski left, [the talk was]: ‘Who will be the new goalscorer?” That is what they talked about.
“I don’t know, people are motivated by different things, I think Mo’s biggest motivation is to win football games and to score, that is definitely the case.
“I don’t think he thinks too often about other players or how often they score. He might do it in May when he has hopefully 34 or 35 and the other two have 32. Before then I can’t see that.”
Was Klopp happy with Salah’s new deal?
The forward was in the final year of his contract and was free to leave the club the next summer, but he ultimately decided to commit his future to the club by signing a contract extension that which will last until 2025.
Salah would have remained just as dedicated to Liverpool’s mission, according to Klopp, but the signing of his new contract will now help them avoid so much press speculation.
“It is of course much better than if we would have been out of contract next summer,” he added.
“Mo would have been the same person, I am 100 per cent sure he could have pushed that aside, but you would not stop asking and that is the problem we constantly face.
“You asked me how he was in training and it’s because ‘ah, the contract’. You ask the players and they say ‘yesterday he was all right’ but these things help, yes.
“It helps much better to know exactly as much as possible about the season after rather than one year, but in the year itself it is not that relevant.
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“I have worked with players in that and not seen it one day and I, as a player, would have been more influenced by this fact that I don’t know where I am next year than these players were.
“It was Gini [Georginio Wijnaldum], Emre Can, it was [Robert] Lewandowski at Dortmund, these boys are real professionals, but we live in a world where everything is important and you have questions all the time and you give an answer and then you think about it and that is different because we all know exactly where we all will be.”
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