Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk have acquired almost an armour-plating at Liverpool, with both so impervious to criticism that the club decided last summer to grant them two of the most lucrative contract extensions in the history of English football.

Salah’s alone is worth £50m until 2027, while the captain is scarcely the poor relation on £350,000 a week. While their signatures were heralded at the time as a triumph of patient negotiation, the money felt faintly obscene for two players with a combined age of 67. Sure enough, their contributions to a shambolic display against a mediocre Manchester United provide ample evidence that, just as their earnings have gone through the roof, their form has fallen off a cliff.

Two glaring examples of their downturns leapt out. The first took just a minute to materialise, as Van Dijk tracked back so dozily that Amad Diallo had time and space to weight the perfect pass for Bryan Mbeumo to strike.

"STAGGERING START!"

One minute on the clock and Mbeumo gives Man Utd the lead at Anfield! 🤯 pic.twitter.com/xOtXAcVYgp

— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) October 19, 2025

The second was even more aggravating for a flustered Arne Slot. With Liverpool desperately chasing an equaliser, Salah, whose only two options were to score or square the ball to Florian Wirtz, contrived to do neither, his snatched shot slicing horribly wide. It was symptomatic of the Egyptian’s malaise in recent weeks, where he has compounded half-hearted efforts at defending with a tendency to rush his decision-making in sight of goal.

Harry Maguire with a MASSIVE header to send the away end wild! 😱 pic.twitter.com/moUtr2aDsj

— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) October 19, 2025

The unpalatable truth is that Salah looks barely 20 per cent of the winger who electrified Liverpool’s title-winning campaign, where he became the first player in the top five European leagues to be directly involved in 50 goals in a single season. While he is still putting himself in superb positions, he seems strangely tentative whenever he has to pull the trigger, having scored just one goal from open play in his last seven. Just as his finishing is nowhere near his customary level, Van Dijk, at 34, has visibly lost a yard of pace, with his lackadaisical attempt at tracking Diallo suggesting he thought he could defend against him by aura alone.

‘Always start with the man in the mirror’

Roy Keane, not averse to slaughtering sacred cows, was withering about Van Dijk’s performance. “He signed a big contract, then you’re giving up loads of goals,” he said. “I’d be looking at him and asking, ‘What are you doing?’ Particularly as leader of the team. A couple of years ago, we talked about United parking the bus here and we were critical. Now they’ve scored two today, two last year, and you’re the centre-half. Always start with the man in the mirror. Van Dijk, if you’re the centre-half and your team are all of a sudden giving up loads of goals, and you’ve got new people coming to your club, you need to have a good look at yourself and think, ‘Am I really helping people?’”

There are many precedents in the Premier League for once-conscientious players to check out mentally once buttressed by lavish contract renewals. Take Marcus Rashford, who had a wondrous 30-goal season two years ago, only to become an expensive carthorse at United once he earned a five-year extension worth £325,000 a week. Mesut Özil, likewise, was never the same after Arsenal made him, in 2018, their highest-paid player ever, rewarding him to the tune of £350,000 a week. With such absurd numbers bringing their own pressure, Ozil could not cope, his attitude becoming so detached that then manager Unai Emery openly questioned his motivation.

Thankfully for Slot, Salah and Van Dijk are far from the stage where their investment in the cause can be doubted. But their struggles are of a magnitude where we can reasonably ask why Liverpool placed them in golden handcuffs at such a late phase of their careers. No player in his mid-30s, besides Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, has ever produced a standard to justify the money that Liverpool’s twin totems now command. Salah is exhibit A, appearing to take his foot off the accelerator almost the instant that the cash injection came through. His decline, which could be temporary, is such that you wonder if Slot will even start him in every game. Unthinkable? Well, so too was the fact that he was substituted after 85 minutes, with Jeremie Frimpong immediately offering a greater threat as his replacement.

Outwardly at least, the manager appears unruffled. “After games like these, it’s quite normal that people focus on individual players,” Slot said. “For the first five or six games it was the signings we made, now it’s Mo Salah.”

The evidence, however, does not lie. Salah has gone longer than ever without a non-penalty goal, scoring as many at Anfield this season as Harry Maguire. Van Dijk, similarly, loses his man more frequently than he ever did, with his technique at times verging on nonchalance. True, they have so much credit in the bank that most Liverpool supporters would not even dream of turning against them. But Slot needs to start seriously considering whether the players he once looked at as his linchpins are now, more often than not, his liabilities.