Mohamed Salah’s Premier League exit raises a bigger question: Where have all the superstars gone? | OneFootball

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

A sentimental distortion. Romanticising a past that never existed. Selective memory dressed up as history.

We’re far too discerning for that. We’d never fall for such childish nonsense. Take off those rose-tinted specs and…

…Wait a minute. That old Sky Sports graphic doing the rounds of the Premier League’s star attractions. Mesut Ozil, Paul Pogba, Kevin De Bruyne, Harry Kane, Mohamed Salah…

As the last of them prepares his goodbyes, do the nostalgists actually have a point? Is football really not what it once was?

To be fair, people were making these arguments five years ago. Ten years ago. Whenever. It’s a tale as old as time.

“All four of Arsenal’s front are top players but none of them are world class. I think Saka can become world class, but in this league Liverpool won a title because they had Mo Salah,” Carragher said of Arsenal back in January 2024.

“City have won titles in the past because they had [Sergio] Aguero and they’ve now got Haaland. Is that enough for Arsenal to win a league title? Are any of them world class right now to take Arsenal to a title? I’d say no.”

Carragher had the last laugh that season, even though Arsenal ended up on 89 points. A points tally that would’ve been enough to get their hands on the trophy in countless other eras.

They won 16 of their last 18 games, but it wasn’t enough against Pep Guardiola’s Man City juggernaut – a feeling that Carragher knew all too well himself, cheering on Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool.

There’s certainly an argument that was actually the best iteration we’ve seen of Mikel Arteta’s Gunners to date. The major difference this time around is that the competition isn’t as strong.

Arsenal, like Liverpool before them, look set to get their rewards for staying hungry and in the fight for long enough. The stars are finally aligning.

Two years later, Carragher doubled down on his position, with Arsenal in the title race driving seat. The former Liverpool defender appeared to concede defeat in his supposition that a team can’t win the Premier League without a superstar forward.

“When have you ever seen a team at the top of the table, who have been top by six or seven points, but if you were picking the team of the Premier League so far, you wouldn’t have one of their players in the front four?” Carragher asked in a January edition of Monday Night Football.

“That is not normal, that would never happen.

“The best team in the league would always have at least one, maybe two players [forwards], in the team of the season.”

The Sky Sports pundit is bang on that an Arsenal title win would be a historic outlier. He cited names like Eden Hazard, Cristiano Ronaldo and indeed Salah as attack-minded players who have defined title triumphs in the past.

No Arsenal fan is claiming Arteta’s 2025-26 team has anything in the same stratosphere as prime Thierry Henry, surely.

Be it in their underwhelming numbers or the eye test – how many memorable moments of awe-inspiring, match-winning quality have they contributed? – the likes of Gabriel Martinelli and Bukayo Saka have not (yet) flourished into the unstoppable forces of nature they once threatened to become.

In fact, if anything – particularly with Saka’s meek performance in Arsenal’s League Cup final defeat fresh in the memory – they appear to have gone backwards.

Viktor Gyokeres has scored goals against bottom-half opposition, helping the Gunners get the points they dropped in his absence last season, but you can’t escape the feeling he’s a relatively one-dimensional flat-track bully when you watch his anonymous and ineffective displays against the Premier League’s better sides.

Eberechi Eze’s stunning strike against Bayer Leverkusen, and subsequent cool-as-f*ck celebration are those of a player with an unmistakable aura. But he’s contributed just nine goals and six assists in 41 appearances for Arsenal and has often struggled in his debut campaign.

Arsenal, as the frontrunners, offer a nice encapsulation of the issue. Who needs a superstar when you’ve got set pieces? In many ways, the game today is played in their image, as it was in Pep Guardiola’s Man City five years ago. They have defined 2026’s ‘meta’, whatever that means.

You look across the league and see similar issues. Salah has fallen off a cliff. Cole Palmer has done very little. The same can be said for Anthony Gordon, Cody Gakpo, Jeremy Doku and countless others. Erling Haaland has barely scored a goal from open play in 2026. How many forwards in midtable or the bottom half have made much of a splash?

Recently, we put together a ranking of the top 10 wingers in world football. Spoiler alert: Not one Premier League player featured in the top seven.

But three former Premier League players did in Michael Olise, Raphinha and Luis Diaz.

They were all (very) good footballers over here, and we’re not going to do a Rio Ferdinand and pretend otherwise. But they have all elevated their status and output exponentially since departing these shores. Nobody was putting them in Ballon d’Or conversations when they were in the Premier League.

Part of that, of course, is going from scrappers like Leeds United and Crystal Palace to elite-level title-winning teams. But you wonder if Olise, Diaz and Raphinha returned to the Premier League – even at top teams – whether they’d look quite as consistently unstoppable.

Florian Wirtz’s difficult adaptation period is living proof of that. What might the playmaker be doing right now had he gone to Vincent Kompany’s imperious Bayern as opposed to an out-of-sorts, dysfunctional Liverpool?

And would Saka and Palmer look like world-beaters if they moved to La Liga or the Bundesliga?

Arsenal have recently been linked with Kvicha Kvaratskhelia. But would the Georgian be nearly as fun and captivating if you placed him into a new, comparatively joyless, environment? And by that we mean the Premier League as a whole rather than just Arsenal, before you get your pitchforks.

There are, of course, exceptions. Bruno Fernandes could smash the assists record. Brentford(!) have a Brazilian No.9 who looks set to go to the World Cup, which is remarkable in itself. Rayan Cherki is a born entertainer who has produced lots from relatively limited opportunities.

Maybe Salah’s drop-off this season isn’t entirely due to his age. Maybe he’s just the poster boy for what the league has become.

Maybe the Premier League’s real star quality is now in its coaches and their ability to drill defences, limit spaces out of possession and snuff talented difference-makers out of the game. Try sticking that in a Sky Sports advert.

Would the likes of Hazard, Ronaldo and Henry have struggled to look as good today? Or have world-class superstars simply died off?

Answers on a postcard, because these are the questions that football in 2026 has us pondering.