Mohamed Salah’s impending departure from Liverpool — confirmed yesterday — did not just mark a huge moment on Merseyside, but across football.
The Egyptian is fourth on the competition’s all-time goalscorers list (191) and seventh for assists (93), prompting many to label him one of the Premier League’s greatest ever attackers.
But is he? We asked a panel of our experts to name the forward they consider the best in the competition’s history.
Mohamed Salah
The very best forwards are those who, when they are one-v-one with the goalkeeper, you just know they are going to score. Mohamed Salah has been that player for Liverpool for almost a decade. And even if he had to shrug off a defender or three, he could. Not just with his quick feet, either. When Salah wasn’t playing, he was in the gym. His core strength has always been something to behold. Instead of him bouncing off big, burly defenders, they bounced off him.
A four-time Golden Boot winner, Salah is the only man to be voted the PFA Players’ Player of the Year three times in the award’s 52-year history. No player has more goal contributions in the Premier League for a single club than Salah has for Liverpool (189 goals, 92 assists). To see the “little dancer” dazzle in and out of defenders or flying forward on a Red Arrows-style counter-attack or cutting inside and scoring one of his trademark goals was – and still is – breathtaking.
I wonder whether Liverpool might ever see another player as dedicated, consistent and as gleefully ruthless in front of goal.
Caoimhe O’Neill
Eden Hazard
There have been better Premier League attackers by numbers alone, but there have been very few — if any — who captured the imagination to the degree Eden Hazard did.
Half-winger, pure showman, Hazard would not always contribute a decisive goal or assist for Chelsea. He would, however, more often than not be in uncontroversially the best player on the pitch in a Premier League match, and the unequivocal focus of attention for both teams as long as he was out there.
This despite the fact that, according to the almost universal testimony of his Chelsea team-mates, Hazard barely applied himself to training during the week. The Belgian was a throwback in the most charming sense; a grinning, winking, slaloming magician who could earn the undying trust of even the most collectivist coach.
Chelsea got more than £100million from his sale to Real Madrid in 2019 but have still never managed to replace his unique genius. The inspiration of two Premier League title-winning teams and the author of many of the club’s greatest memories this century, his impact at Stamford Bridge may never be replicated.
Liam Twomey
Eden Hazard was a force of nature for Chelsea (Ian Kington/AFP via Getty Images)
Dennis Bergkamp
An obvious choice, but also a personal one. On May 5, 1996, Bergkamp scored the winner against Bolton on the last day of the season to secure fifth place and Arsenal’s qualification for the UEFA Cup (today’s Europa League). I was 13 years old and sitting in the lower tier of Highbury’s East Stand with my mum, having won tickets by writing a poem in a Junior Gunners competition.
It was my first time watching football live, and I will forever remember the crowd breaking into a rendition of, “Walking in a Bergkamp Wonderland” in the moments of elation that followed his wonderful turn and strike into the top corner from 25 yards out that sealed a 2-1 victory.
Of course, there were more goals of such quality to come. The perfect pirouette and lofted finish against Sunderland in the FA Cup third round in 1997. The sensational hat-trick against Leicester that saw him place first, second and third in the BBC’s Goal of the Month voting for August of the same year. The turn that defied all logic and led to one of the greatest ever Premier League goals against Newcastle in March 2002.
And it wasn’t just the goals; Bergkamp’s vision created countless opportunities for his team-mates to score, too.
He was beauty and intelligence combined in a wonderful, unique package that, 30 years later, this 43-year-old is forever grateful she got to see.
Sarah Shephard
Gareth Bale
Rarely do you see a footballer with devastating pace, destructive power and an eye for goal. In his final season at Tottenham, Gareth Bale had the lot — and that made him the most expensive footballer in history at that time when Real Madrid bought him a few months later.
He managed 21 Premier League goals largely from the wing in that 2012-13 campaign, and a 24-minute hat-trick in a 4-0 December win against Aston Villa was the Welshman at his very best.
The sense of goalscoring inevitability every time Bale picked up the ball in that game is not something I had felt before, and is certainly not something I have felt since. The first goal mixed pace immaculately with calm, while numbers two and three were about perfectly-timed runs and thumping finishes.
Thousands of Villa fans, who had watched their team get trounced 8-0 at Chelsea three days before, delayed their early exits from the ground just to applaud Bale off the pitch when he was substituted in the 85th minute.
Ed Mackey
Sergio Aguero
I remember watching in astonishment as Sergio Aguero scored his first goals for Manchester City, including slamming home his second of the game from 25 yards in a 4-0 win against Swansea, just half an hour after coming on for his debut. I was also in the stadium to witness his final goal that season — number 30 across all competitions, crashing the ball in at the near post to seal City’s first ever Premier League title in the dying seconds of their last match — but my memory is a little hazier after that.
Aguero left City nine years later as their record scorer, with 184 goals and 47 assists, having started 235 games in the Premier League. He had a knack for the big moments and an eye for the spectacular, and is surely the most clinical finisher English football has ever seen.
The Argentinian struck fear into the biggest clubs, scoring 15 against Chelsea, 11 against Arsenal, and most importantly, nine against Manchester United. And he loved a hat-trick, holding the top-flight record with 12, scoring four three times and even getting five in one game against Newcastle in October 2015.
He was ruthless, and without season after season of Aguero’s unerring consistency and match-winning magic, City would not have experienced half of the exhilaration on their way to becoming English football’s dominant force.
Thom Harris
Sergio Aguero’s title-winning moment at Manchester City (Paul Ellis/AFP/GettyImages)
Cristiano Ronaldo
Considering he is one of the greatest players in the history of football, the Portugal legend is often overlooked in lists of the top Premier League forwards.
Perhaps that is because his finest feats undoubtedly came away from the English game, either for Real Madrid or for his country, or maybe it is because he did not do a great deal to convey a winning personality to fans. His role in Wayne Rooney’s 2006 World Cup quarter-final red card and the infamous wink that followed alienated a large section of English supporters.
But even if Cristiano Ronaldo only reached stratospheric levels of performance when he moved to Spain — 450 goals in 438 appearances for Madrid — he still achieved remarkable success in the first of two spells at Manchester United.
He scored 84 times in 196 Premier League appearances in those six years, despite playing primarily as a winger, won three successive Premier League titles, a Champions League, the Golden Boots for both that division and broader Europe and the first of his five Ballons d’Or.
An all-time great, who was set on his way in Manchester.
Steve Madeley
Harry Kane
When Harry Kane first forced his way into the Tottenham team, initially under Tim Sherwood and then Mauricio Pochettino, he was all youthful energy and willingness; a selfless, physical No 9. But over time, you realised there was far more to him than that.
Kane was a remarkable striker of the ball, working tirelessly on his finishing, so that he could find any corner of the net at will. He also had a formidable football brain and understanding of space. He was as happy to drop off and play as a No 10 as he was to challenge centre-backs as a No 9. And when he dropped, took the ball and turned, he could play passes that Kevin De Bruyne would be proud of.
Over Kane’s time at Spurs, as he continued to rack up mountains of goals and assists, you realised you were lucky to be watching such a unique player. Watching him at his best, imaginative, precise, decisive, always two steps ahead of everyone else, is to feel you are in the presence of mastery.
Jack Pitt-Brooke
Thierry Henry
There are players who have scored more goals. There are players who have created more goals. There are players who have graced and illuminated the Premier League stage for longer.
But has any forward scaled and maintained such heights of performance in the division as Thierry Henry did at Arsenal in the early-to-mid 2000s? He was a showman, full of tricks, flicks and brooding charisma, but he was also a devastatingly incisive attacker, an exceptionally rare blend of pace, poise, flamboyance and ruthlessness.
There haven’t been many times over the Premier League era when it has felt possible to convince yourself you are watching the greatest footballer on the planet in the competition. Henry in an Arsenal shirt gave you that feeling. He never won the Ballon d’Or, but there were certainly periods when his performance level was comparable to that of Luis Figo at Real Madrid, Ronaldinho at Barcelona and Andriy Shevchenko at Milan.
As a reporter based in the north-west of England at that time, my opportunities to watch him in the flesh were restricted to perhaps four or five a season. On most of those occasions, he left me gasping. Three performances in particular — one at Liverpool, one at Manchester City, one at Leeds — are lodged in the mind.
In the Premier League of the early 2000s, which was nothing like the free-spirited era that nostalgia tries to persuade you it was, Henry’s mesmerising and brutally effective brilliance put him on an altogether different plane.
Oliver Kay
Wayne Rooney
Right from the start, Wayne Rooney played like he was in the schoolyard, with a free-wheeling, bustling, mercurial abandon that set him apart.
The kid who went back to kicking a ball around on his street corner in the Croxteth area of Liverpool the day after making his Premier League debut for Everton was so astonishingly gifted he would make top-level games his own playground for years to come. He was a boy who was better than most of the men he faced.
That iconic goal against Arsenal at the age of 16 summed up his ability to do things seasoned pros could only dream of. It set him on the path to trophies with Manchester United and goal-scoring records for England, by which stage his brilliance became normalised.
But the primal thrill of watching Rooney take games by the scruff of the neck at will never fade.
Greg O’Keeffe
Wayne Rooney’s big breakthrough match for Everton against Arsenal in 2002 (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)
Alan Shearer
This is irrefutable, surely?
Aesthetically, Shearer may not have been Thierry Henry. He may not have been the most skilled attacker the Premier League has ever seen, and he may not have been a delightful dribbler, but he is the competition’s record scorer by a distance of 47 because he was the most effective in front of goal.
His Premier League haul of 260 would have been even greater but for two serious injuries which affected his pace and mobility.
At Blackburn Rovers, Shearer was lethal, scoring more than 30 league goals in three successive campaigns. Once he returned to his native Newcastle for a world-record fee in 1996, he spent a decade plundering goals on Gallowgate, retiring at the age of 35.
The former England captain’s brutal efficiency in front of goal is what set him apart. He could power in free kicks, was lethal in the air and had a unique instinct for positioning himself to get on to the end of crosses.
Erling Haaland may one day threaten his record, but Shearer had been peerless up until the Norwegian’s arrival in the Premier League.
Chris Waugh