Editorial Sebastian Culea: This is Liverpool. I'm looking for a hero

Mohamed Salah was, for ten years, the compass and the modern myth of Liverpool. His goals rewrote the identity of a city that lives through football. It's just that the myths, once imprinted too deeply in the collective consciousness, begin to press. They are starting to become dogma.

Arne Slot, the coach who talks more about mechanisms than inspiration, found himself between a sacred past and a future that refuses to be born. Fans asked him for courage: “keep Salah on the bench” – has been the community's call for the past two months.

Who is throwing whom “under the bus”?

And when he finally does, the team wins the duel with West Ham. A draw with Sunderland follows, the revelation of the season, only to be broken, in an absurd ending at Leeds, in which Liverpool are tied in extra time, a game in which Salah does not get a single minute on the field: the Egyptian, out of exaggerated pride, ends up looking for the journalists and suggests that the coach and the club want to throw him “under the bus”. The same supporters who asked Slot for courage, now want him hanged in the public square.

Excluded from the team after the public outing, Salah does not travel to Milan for the duel with Inter. In a second, the balance of power turns upside down. Those who asked for blood become advocates for the victim. Those who invoked discipline are now asking for leniency. Liverpool, the club that has always put the collective spirit above everything, lives a small schism – between nostalgia and lucidity.

“No player is bigger than the club”, says the English saying. But modern football lives precisely on the exceptions to this rule. The fans may be right when they remember that without Salah, last season Liverpool would have slipped into mediocrity, but it is an obvious exaggeration when, blinded by the pure statistical mirage, they say that Liverpool would have finished 16th without the Egyptian international. Because that's how football works, right? Salah basically played alone. Football is an ecosystem of variable factors, not a linear equation.

We are no longer in last season, and performance, whatever its nature, is not an eternal credit. Football, especially at this level, is a relentless present: you are what you are. Now.

Mo is not the problem

Slot is not without fault. With a transfer campaign of half a billion euros, he has yet to find a coherent eleven. Wirtz and Isak seem lost between ideas and helplessness, Konate is glaringly wrong even in the few games where the team looks decent, with embarrassing performances even for the Superliga, which have already made Real abandon any interest they had in the French defender in the summer.

Liverpool's fluid possession became a succession of fragile intentions. Even when they win, the team seems to be playing against its own identity.

Two moments took the breath away from the project and are, perhaps!, defining at the moment: Diaz's departure to Bayern and missing the transfer of Guehi, who probably would have offered some kind of security in a defense deforested by transfers and injuries.

Maybe Salah isn't the problem. Maybe Slot is not the solution either. Perhaps Liverpool are just crossing that threshold of inevitable metamorphosis – the one where a club must find meaning after completing a cycle. However, there is also the “golden sky at the end of the storm”: Alisson remains an absolute guarantee, Gravenberch is at his peak – or at least that's how he presented himself at the beginning of the season, while the team was still functional, Ekitike seems right, the qualities of Wirtz, Frimpong or Isak can erupt at any time, and the form, involvement and talent of Szoboszlai pave the way for a new leader at Anfield.

After all, the truth is less poetic: sometimes,great teams don't fall apart because they lose games, but because they start to confuse reputation with intrinsic performance. Maybe Liverpool need new heroes.