When Rival Fans Start Pleading For Your Old Boys, You Know Something

There is a particular kind of compliment Liverpool fans never get tired of hearing, and it happened again this week. Watching pundits with Manchester United sympathies sit around openly wishing they had Liverpool’s modern greats is not a new occurrence, but it never stops being a useful measuring stick for where the two clubs actually stand.

Salah’s shadow still looms large

Luke Littler was first to go there, reaching for Mohamed Salah without much hesitation. “We haven’t been treated with right wingers, have we?” is about as blunt as it gets from a United leaning voice, and it is hard to disagree with it. For the best part of a decade, Salah was the difference between Liverpool winning tight games and dropping points, a forward whose output barely dipped even as the panel of players around him changed almost every summer. He left Anfield this past summer after nine trophy laden years, and it says plenty that his name is still the first one reached for when rival voices are asked who they would take tomorrow.

Paul Scholes needed a nudge, but he got there too, admitting he had forgotten about Salah before settling on taking both him and Virgil van Dijk if he was given the choice.

Van Dijk remains the gold standard at the back

Scholes’ first instinct, though, was defensive. Van Dijk was his opening answer, no hesitation at all, and the reasoning that followed told its own story about United’s last decade in the transfer market. Positional discipline, command in the air, the calm that lets a defence reset after a mistake, Van Dijk still offers all of it at a stage in his career when plenty of centre backs start to fade. Scholes even joked about needing an emergency fix a few years back, floating Steven Gerrard as a makeshift centre half, before landing back on the obvious answer. Liverpool already had the one centre back everyone else still wanted.

The real story is about United, not Liverpool

None of this is really about Liverpool at all. It is a window into how far Manchester United still have to travel. When pundits with United sympathies spend their time debating which Liverpool players they would parachute into Old Trafford rather than debating their own options, the gap has not closed, it has calcified. Liverpool have had the luxury of building entire eras around players like these. United are still auditioning candidates for jobs Liverpool solved years ago.

A reminder of what Iraola has inherited

It is worth remembering this as Andoni Iraola reshapes his own squad. Salah has already gone, and sooner or later Van Dijk’s influence at the back will fade too. The lesson from this debate is not that Liverpool should feel smug about it, it is that replacing this level of player, twice over, is exactly the challenge Iraola and the recruitment department face next. United have spent years failing to do it even once.