Mohamed Salah was an unused substitute for the full 90 minutes for the third time under Arne Slot in Wednesday\u2019s 2\u20130 defeat to Paris Saint-Germain. That solitary statistic has come to symbolise a fracturing relationship that began earlier in the season when a spell out of the starting XI first triggered questions over his future.<\/p>\n
After being benched for three straight games, two of which did not end in a cameo appearance, Salah went public with a vicious attack on Slot from which neither man has recovered. The contrast with his record under J\u00fcrgen Klopp is stark: across 349 appearances with Klopp he was an unused substitute on just three occasions, a figure he has already matched in only 87 outings for Slot.<\/p>\n
The raw numbers underline the shift. Under J\u00fcrgen Klopp: Appearances 349, Starts 317, Substitute 32, Unused Substitute 3. Under Arne Slot: Appearances 87, Starts 80, Substitute 7, Unused Substitute 3.<\/p>\n
All three Klopp-era benchings came in 2019\u201320, a season disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic in which Salah still managed 23 goals and 13 assists as Liverpool won the Premier League title. The first unused appearance came at Crystal Palace in November 2019, a fitness-related decision after an ankle issue. Klopp said: \u201cYesterday was the first session where everything was fine, but it was a bit late then, to be honest,\u201d.<\/p>\n
A few weeks later he was left out for the Merseyside derby as Klopp rotated. \u201cWe think the game will be really intense and for this you need kind of fresh legs and we try to bring them in,\u201d he explained before a 5\u20132 victory inspired by fringe stars like Divock Origi, Xherdan Shaqiri and Adam Lallana. A final benching against Everton in June 2020 was again explained as injury-related, with Klopp arguing \u201cthe right thing to do\u201d was to protect his unfit superstar.<\/p>\n
Slot\u2019s decisions have been defended on similar grounds. When he first benched Salah against West Ham United in November 2025 he insisted: \u201cFour games in 10 days with only 14, 15 outfield players available for us, then you have to decide once in a while to make a certain lineup and you try to pick the best lineup for every single game.\u201d He pointed to squad \u201cbalance\u201d against Sunderland and acknowledged: \u201cIt\u2019s never an easy decision because we all know what a great player he is,\u201d adding, \u201cBut it is also up to me to pick the team that I think we need today. That\u2019s why I made the decision.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those selections culminated in the public fallout that helped precipitate Salah\u2019s eventual departure this summer. Slot has accepted the role of the perceived \u201cbad guy\u201d in that process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Three benchings under Slot match Salah’s unused substitute tally under Klopp and escalated tensions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11278,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[230,175,969],"tags":[1484,1305,1304],"class_list":["post-11279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analytics-stats","category-liverpool","category-premier-league","tag-appearance-record","tag-bench-selection","tag-benching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11279\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}