Why Liverpool sacked Arne Slot and Mohamed Salah's role in the decision

The Egyptian scored 250 goals for Liverpool, won them two Premier League titles and a Champions League, then, in his final season, he may have done one last thing for the club - pushed the board over the edge on its most consequential decision of the summer.

Football has a habit of reducing complex institutional failures to convenient narratives. A manager goes and suddenly the story needs a villain, a catalyst, a single moment that explains everything.

In the case of Arne Slot's dismissal, that moment or rather, that post arrived on social media a fortnight before the sacking. Mohamed Salah, nine years a Red, days away from his final appearance at Anfield, published a pointed, barely-veiled call for Liverpool to reclaim their "heavy metal attacking" identity.

The implication was unmistakable: the current manager had failed to provide it.

The question now dividing opinion is not whether the post was appropriate - it was not - the question is whether it mattered and the evidence, when examined in full, suggests the honest answer is: more than the club will ever admit, and less than the narrative would have you believe.

The timeline that led to Arne Slot’s breaking point

To understand the role Salah played in Slot's dismissal, it is necessary to understand how their relationship deteriorated and how quickly it did so after what seemed in April 2025 to be a settled and productive partnership.

Slot's first season at Anfield was a triumph by almost any measure. With a squad largely inherited from Jurgen Klopp and minimal transfer expenditure, the Dutchman delivered the club's 20th league title in dominant fashion.

Salah was a central figure in that success, producing one of the finest individual campaigns of his career. When he finally committed to a new two-year deal in April 2025, Slot said he was "very happy" that Salah had extended his stay, less than a year later, the two men were barely speaking.

The rupture began in late November 2025, the most consequential moment of the season arrived when Slot dropped Salah from the team against West Ham United on November 30, a decision that would come to define the entirety of 2025-26.

Salah was also benched for the following games against Sunderland and Leeds, before furiously lambasting those behind the scenes after a 3-3 draw at Elland Road, telling reporters he had been "thrown under the bus".

Slot explained the rationale plainly enough - against West Ham, he wanted an extra midfielder, he won, so he repeated the approach against Sunderland. Against Leeds, he faced a 5-3-2 and chose to play a different attacking configuration, opting for Hugo Ekitike rather than Salah on the right side.

These were defensible tactical decisions from any objective standpoint, Slot was a manager trying to find solutions in a season that was rapidly unravelling.

None of that context softened Salah's reaction. The Egyptian, having sat on the bench for the third successive game and watched Liverpool collapse from 2-0 up to draw 3-3, was raw with frustration.

"The third time on the bench, I think for the first time in my career," he said. "It seems like the club has thrown me under the bus, someone doesn't want me in the club." The language was incendiary, it was also very public, and that was the problem.

Salah was subsequently excluded from the travelling squad for Liverpool's midweek Champions League win against Inter Milan at San Siro. The message from Slot was clear: authority would not be sacrificed for sentiment, regardless of who was challenging it.

For a brief moment, the majority of supporters backed the manager, Jamie Carragher wrote in The Telegraph that, in a choice between a title-winning Anfield manager and a multi-title-winning footballer, the coach wins every time, and that the most dedicated, vocal supporters in and around the city were behind Slot rather than Salah.

But the season continued to deteriorate, by March 24, 2026, Liverpool confirmed that Salah would leave at the end of the season, a year ahead of schedule, his contract, signed less than twelve months earlier, cut short by mutual agreement.

He departed on a free transfer, forgoing the protection of his final year, reportedly having been Liverpool's highest-paid player at approximately £25m per season. Whatever promises were exchanged in April 2025 when that extension was signed, they had evidently been rendered worthless by December, that is a remarkable institutional breakdown in the space of eight months.

Mohamed Salah’s post that changed everything

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A post shared by Mohamed Salah (@mosalah)

Salah's March departure announcement did not ignite the decisive firestorm - that came later. In May 2026, days before his final Anfield appearance, Salah posted on social media calling for a return to "heavy metal attacking football", a term directly associated with Jurgen Klopp and loaded with implied criticism of the football being played under his successor.

What followed was remarkable, the post was publicly liked by a significant number of Liverpool's first-team players, including Florian Wirtz, Dominik Szoboszlai, Curtis Jones, Hugo Ekitike, Andy Robertson and Jeremie Frimpong.

When those names were counted, there was suddenly a public mutiny on Merseyside, the optics alone were damaging; the reality in the dressing room was likely far worse.

Wirtz, when pressed on the likes, attempted to defuse the situation. The German playmaker suggested the reaction had been made too big, framing Salah's post as the departing forward wanting to make everyone at the club aware they needed to work harder and do better, adding that the entire squad was unhappy with the season.

It was a measured attempt at damage limitation but the likes were there, they had been seen, they could not be unseen.

Fabrizio Romano was unambiguous about the impact. Salah went on social media and shared complaints that a major number of Liverpool players shared by liking that post.

Salah was really, really complaining, and that was "also impactful for sure" in the decision to sack the manager. In a saga defined by ambiguity, that is about as close to a direct line of causation as anyone is likely to draw.

The case that results were the real story

Yet the post-Slot narrative risks doing a disservice to the scale of the actual footballing failure, the results were not a backdrop to a personality clash, they were, in isolation, sufficient grounds for dismissal.

Liverpool lost 12 times in the Premier League alone and conceded 78 goals across all competitions, finishing fifth, a distant, undignified fifth. The Reds ultimately secured Champions League qualification only on the final day of the season, finishing 25 points behind Arsenal in the table.

This is a club that, a year earlier, had been champions, the regression was not incremental, it was catastrophic.

Liverpool came to the conclusion that the team's playing style needed to evolve to a more aggressive, front-foot approach, a concern that pre-dated Salah's social media post and represented a structural critique of Slot's footballing model.

The club had spent £450m in the summer of 2025, that outlay was supposed to produce a title challenge, it produced 12 league defeats and dressing-room discord - no amount of personnel management would have transformed those numbers into an acceptable return.

Slot himself, to his credit, never hid behind the Salah saga as an excuse, when asked about his decision-making in the context of the Salah friction, he said he looked back at the season thinking he could have made a few decisions better, but was not specifically referencing his handling of the Egyptian.

He added that he had no regrets about many of the things he did across his time at the club. That is not the language of a man who felt he had been brought down by a player's Instagram account.

The uncomfortable truth

Here is where the debate gets genuinely complicated. Football clubs do not sack managers because of social media posts but they are significantly more likely to act when the dressing room is visibly fractured, when the body language on and off the pitch confirms what the results have been suggesting for months.

Salah's post, and crucially the cascade of likes from key players, provided concrete, public evidence of exactly that fracture.

Romano himself noted that Salah's comments "hit home in a massive way" at the club, and that the end-of-season review initially framed as a formality became something far more consequential in its aftermath.

There is a broader irony here that should not be glossed over. Salah had signed a two-year contract extension in April 2025, less than a year later, his relationship with the club had deteriorated so severely that Liverpool agreed to cut that contract short by a season, releasing him as a free agent.

That is not simply the story of a player and a manager failing to get along, it is the story of an institution that lost control of its own dressing room, the responsibility for that failure cannot be placed entirely at Salah's feet, nor entirely at Slot's.

What is fair to say is this: Salah did not get Slot sacked - 12 Premier League defeats got Slot sacked; a £450m squad that finished fifth got Slot sacked; a style of football that alienated players and supporters alike got Slot sacked, but when a nine-year servant of the club, one of the greatest players in its history, publishes a public indictment of the manager's methods and the most expensive player in the squad, plus the first-choice full-backs, click like, it does not go unnoticed in the boardroom, It goes on the pile and sometimes, it is what tips the pile over.

The Egyptian forward leaves Anfield as a legend, departing a year early, on a free transfer, having scored 250 goals and won nearly every honour English football has to offer, he did not pull the trigger on Arne Slot but nobody would seriously argue his finger was not resting somewhere on the grip.