Who is the greatest player the Premier League has ever seen? Thierry Henry is usually the default answer to that question.
Close your eyes for a moment and think of his pace, his power, his agility. He was, in many ways, Arsene Wenger’s most beautiful sculpture, the crafting of a spindly winger, who arrived from Juventus for £11million in 1999 with questions to answer, into the ultimate attacking machine.
Ryan Moore, currently the world’s finest flat jockey, is an Arsenal fan and goes into a place of wonder when rewinding to the days of his youth, sitting close to the pitch at Highbury, watching Henry, the perfect athletic specimen, jump ’10 feet in the air’.
‘What a treat,’ Moore, no stranger to achieving greatness, recalls. ‘It was just… different. Everything: it was quicker, faster, sharp. It was special. You thought he was running at 100mph.’
Jamie Carragher would agree. He still looks like he’s seen a ghost when he tells you the story of marking peak Henry at Anfield in January 2003, on a night Liverpool somehow pilfered a 2-2 draw. Trying to stay with the Frenchman, Carragher says, was like having a foot race with a motorbike.
How many of his goals can you easily recall? What about the run at Highbury, in April 2004, that left Liverpool’s defence as tangled as a lawnmower cable, or the flick, pirouette and match-winning volley against Manchester United, in September 2000, that even prompted congratulations from Sir Alex Ferguson?
Jamie Carragher has said trying to keep pace with Thierry Henry was like having a foot race with a motorbike
Henry’s match-winning swivel and volley against Manchester United at Highbury in 2000 is considered one of the best goals in Premier League history
Nobody ever thought Henry would be surpassed. Plenty of others have been in the conversation — where might Eric Cantona stand had he not retired abruptly in 1997, after winning five titles in six years? — from Dennis Bergkamp to Kevin De Bruyne, Wayne Rooney to Steven Gerrard to Ryan Giggs.
Henry, though, has always been the standard-bearer. But is that still the case? Almost by stealth, it can now be argued he’s been nudged off his throne by Mohamed Salah, who won a record third PFA Player of the Year award on Tuesday and yet remains underrated by many.
‘Heresy!’ many will screech when considering the implication.
The off-the-cuff reaction, driven by tribalism, would be to say Salah couldn’t lay a glove on Arsenal’s totem — a World Cup winner in 1998 and European champion with France in 2000, don’t forget — and their respective achievements cannot be compared.
Can’t they? Well, let’s start. Henry won the Premier League twice with Arsenal, in 2002 and 2004. Really, there should have been another, with 2003 the one that got away. Salah can say the same, his brace coming in 2020 and 2025 but he still wonders how they didn’t lift the trophy in 2019 and 2022.
OK, team awards are one thing, you may counter — line up the individual gongs! Henry won the Football Writers’ Association (FWA) Player of the Year award three times but Salah, who has thrived with extra leadership responsibilities under Arne Slot, has done exactly the same — and he wants to make it four, this year or next.
Goals, then. Surely Henry leaves Salah behind here? He won the Golden Boot on four occasions. But Salah can say ‘snap’ — he’s also scored more goals and has more assists to his name than Henry, with 187 and 87 surpassing 175 and 74. One caveat: Henry scored his in 258 Premier League games — which works out at a goal every 1.5 games — while Salah has played 302 games, scoring every 1.6 games.
Premier League Player of the Month, perhaps? Again, the numbers fall in Salah’s favour. Henry, somehow, was only awarded this trinket four times, a fact that needed triple-checking as it seemed so low — or maybe it was indicative of how many good players were operating in that era? Salah has almost twice as many, with seven.
Salah has won the Premier League Player of the Month award seven times, to Henry’s four
Salah left a trail of Arsenal players in his wake as he scored a superb solo goal against the Gunners in 2017
The one area in which Henry outpoints Salah is that he was included in the PFA Team of the Year six times, two ahead of the Egyptian, and he remains the only player to have more than 20 goals and 20 assists in the one campaign, in 2002-03.
Yet Salah doesn’t fall short in the highlights reel stakes. There was a goal against Arsenal, in August 2017, after he ran half the length of the pitch, a scene that resembled an Olympic sprinter competing in the parents’ 100m dash at a school sports day; hapless defenders strewn in his wake.
How about those moments against Tottenham (February 2018) and Manchester City (October 2021) when it wasn’t wrong to liken his tap-dancing in tight areas to Lionel Messi, or the left-foot drive against Chelsea, in April 2019, that was still gaining speed as it ripped into the net?
‘He’s an immaculate professional, all about the detail,’ Salah’s old captain, Jordan Henderson, once said. ‘He’s an obsessive about the game. He’s always first in the gym and lives for football, constantly thinking about how to improve recovery to make sure he is ready for the next game.’
The key word in it all is ‘obsessive’ — Salah signed a two-year extension knowing he could still make huge contributions. He is 39 goals behind second-placed Roger Hunt (285) in Liverpool’s all-time scorer’s list and is intent on becoming just the second man, after Ian Rush, to reach 300 for the club.
His next goal will take him past Andy Cole, on 187, into fourth on the all-time Premier League list and he is fixated on becoming the first foreign player to have 200 top-flight goals in the modern era. When you read it all back, the argument is compelling: Salah has climbed to the top of the tree. He may stay there for some considerable time.
