Is Barcola meant to fill the hole Salah left?

The 2026/27 season will see Liverpool without their number one man, Mohamed Salah, for the first time since 2018. Replacing a player of his caliber, experience, and unique profile is anything but easy — doing it without receiving a penny in transfer fee is a huge financial risk. The winger market has been getting harder and harder to navigate these last couple of years; with inflated prices and less supply, it requires more caution and planning than ever. Liverpool identified Yan Diomande as their number one replacement for Salah early in the season.

As shown in the radar comparisons below, Diomande would have been a great replacement for Salah. The combination of great playmaking skills and a great eye for goal is a rare and sought-after profile that both players seem to fit, with Diomande's only weakness coinciding with Salah's as well. An important attribute they share is their off-ball separation, a skill not found in any other Liverpool attacker.

Now to Barcola: his playmaking numbers are at a great level, as shown below. The radars for both players appear almost identical. On the Raumdeuter radar, however, there are some changes. Barcola lacks a bit of Salah's clinicalness, and most importantly, a lot of his off-ball separation. To translate the difference across leagues, we can compare both players to the Champions League. On average, a Premier League winger increases their off-ball separation by 5.65 (+11.3 percentile), while the average Ligue 1 player decreases theirs by 4.28 (−30.9 percentile). Using this metric, we could expect Barcola's numbers to fall, meaning the gap would be even larger. This huge difference in off-ball separation would see him receive the ball in less space than Salah, and less than he is used to — leading to less dangerous chances for Liverpool and harder chances for Barcola.

This change would disrupt Liverpool's attack as they lack a player with this skill. Making their attack more stale and seeing less clear cut chances than they are used to. Whether Barcola's own separation number recovers or slips further once he's actually wearing a Liverpool shirt is impossible to say for certain — the closest evidence we have is how he and his positional peers performed when the opposition stepped up a level within their own leagues this past season, and on that evidence the picture is mixed rather than settled: Barcola's own off-ball separation actually rose against Champions League opponents, even as two of his PSG teammates saw it collapse. If that trend holds, the gap to Salah may not be as wide as the raw Ligue 1 number suggests — but if it doesn't, Liverpool could be left without the one attribute that made their front line so hard to defend, and it's this uncertainty, as much as any confirmed decline, that makes replacing Salah's profile such a difficult problem to solve with one signing.

An obvious issue we haven’t touched yet is whether either player will be able to match Salahs output earlier seasons. It is hard to predict the future but I can say with certainty that neither player will come close, but that’s okay. Finding a player of Salahs profile as an elite playmaking winger combined with world class output and top three in the league poaches abilities is pretty much impossible. Luckily Liverpool saw to this issue last year with the signings of Ekitike and Isak to take some of the burden. Meaning Liverpools poacher needs are set and they are mostly looking for a playmaking winger with ability to find space to run into.

To answer whether Barcola is brought in to simply fill the hole of Mohammed salah, the answer is: not really. Diomande’s data made clear early on what Liverpool were originally chasing, a profile that matched Salah's shape almost stat-for-stat, off-ball separation included, which only sharpens how visible the gap is now that Barcola, not Diomande, is the one stepping into that role. Whether that gap closes once Barcola is actually playing in a Liverpool shirt is genuinely uncertain, and the Champions League comparison only goes so far in settling it. But if his off-ball separation doesn't recover to something closer to Salah's level, this stops being a simple one-for-one swap and starts looking like a genuine shift in how Liverpool's attack functions, fewer of the disguised, in-behind runs that used to open defenses up, and more reliance elsewhere to manufacture the same clear-cut chances. That's the real stakes of this signing: not just whether Barcola is good enough, but whether Liverpool's attack quietly becomes a different shape entirely.