No one should be this good, and almost no one ever is. After scoring three times and assisting on another during Sunday’s 5-0 demolition of Manchester United at Old Trafford, Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah has scored 10 Premier League goals and recorded five assists. Last year in the Premier League, only 13 players hit those marks -- across 38 games.

Now, it seems silly to divide down Salah’s numbers to a per-90-minute level. The whole point of Moahamed Salah is that he’s always playing. With Liverpool, he’s averaging more than 3,000 minutes per Premier League season -- a threshold usually reserved for goalkeepers and center backs. And this year, he’s on pace to play all 3,420. He’s been the most reliable attacker in the world since he moved back to England. He’s just always out there.

However, the limitations of basic mathematics do require us to normalize Salah’s numbers to some kind of baseline in order to compare him to players from seasons past since he currently has no peers. He’s got 15 goals and assists in the Premier League this year, and no one else is in double-digits. But even when you compare him to recent history, his cohort doesn’t grow by much -- if at all.

Stats Perform has data going back to the start of the 2008-09 season, and since then, just eight players have played at least 2,000 minutes in a season and averaged at least 1.00 non-penalty goals+assists per 90 minutes. The list:

1) Luis Suarez, 13-14 Liverpool: 1.30
2) Mohamed Salah, 17-18 Liverpool: 1.27
3) Didier Drogba, 09-10 Chelsea: 1.23
4) Daniel Sturridge, 13-14 Liverpool: 1.11
5) Harry Kane, 16-17 Tottenham: 1.10
6) Sergio Aguero, 14-15 Manchester City: 1.02
7) Cesc Fabregas, 09-10 Arsenal: 1.01
8) Robin van Persie, 11-12 Arsenal: 1.00

So far this season, Salah’s cranking along at 1.56 non-penalty goals+assists per 90 minutes. For added context, Lionel Messi only had one season with a better rate: 12-13, when he scored 42 non-penalty goals and added 11 assists for an absurd combined rate of 1.80 per 90 minutes. The fact that Messi only did it once suggests that Salah won’t be able to keep this up for a full season, and so, too, do his underlying numbers. He’s currently at just -- “just” -- 1.02 non-penalty expected goals and expected assists per 90 minutes. But despite some famous dry spells, he’s historically been an above-average finisher. As of late September, he’d added about 10 non-penalty goals via his shooting since joining Liverpool, per Statsbomb data. And if we just completely ignored where the shots ended up, he’d still be sitting in a select group, as the van Persie (1.04) and Salah (1.03) seasons from above are the only ones to break the 1.00 xG+xA mark.

And that’s just what he’s producing, not how he’s playing. The latter makes the former look even more remarkable. If you’ve watched Liverpool closely this year you’ve noticed that, in the final-third, Trent Alexander-Arnold has frequently drifted infield. Here’s a heatmap of his touches last season ...

... and this season:

This accomplishes a bunch of things. It gets Liverpool’s best passer into the half-space, an in-between zone where a number of different players on the opposing team could pick him up. It requires the opposing defense to shuffle their typical responsibilities, as a player who’d normally be marked by a wide player is now suddenly outside of the zone usually occupied by wide players. The more you can make the defense think; the more likely they are to make a mistake or take an extra second to react. The positioning also gives Liverpool’s best passer a new, wider set of passing angles to choose from, as opposed to the limited choices you can make when butting up against the sideline. Plus, simply, it just gets Liverpool’s best passer closer to the goal.

In a vacuum, that’s a positive. However, it’s also meant that Liverpool’s best attacker has been farther from the goal. Compare Salah’s touches from last season ...

... to his touches from this season:

He’s most frequently on the ball near the sideline or on the edge of the penalty area, rather than in the box or in that same half-space that TAA is now occupying. Although Salah is on the ball more this season -- 50.3 touches per 90, compared to his Liverpool average of 47.5 -- he’s actually averaging his fewest touches inside the penalty area since he arrived at Anfield: 8.67, down slightly from his LFC average of 9.2. The theme is similar to how he’s getting the ball. He’s receiving 62 passes per game, up a few from his average of 59.2, but despite getting the ball more often, the passes aren’t as dangerous. He’s receiving 10.9 progressive passes¹ per match, compared to 12.4 over his Liverpool career.

And yet with Salah getting on the ball in dangerous positions less frequently than ever before, Liverpool’s attack -- and its best attacker -- is better than ever before, too. Salah isn’t getting on the end of incisive passes or balls into the box as often as in years past; instead, he’s playing them more often. He’s completing 4.67 progressive passes per 90 -- nearly one above his LFC average of 3.73. He’s completing 2.3 passes into the penalty area per 90 -- more than he ever has before. And he’s already completed seven through balls this season -- just one below his total from last season and already one more than he completed in all of 17-18.

In a sense, Salah burst onto the scene at Liverpool with one of the three or four best individual attacking seasons in Premier League history. But as the team matured into one of the better defensive sides in the world and got comfortable playing at much slower and much more controlled pace (at times), Salah’s individual numbers took a hit as he gradually started to do more and more of the little things in build-up play that would eventually lead to goals or allow Liverpool to keep more possession in more dangerous areas or both. Except, now this season he’s more involved in buildup play than ever before, and he’s been just as dangerous in front of goal as he was in his first year with the club. He’s not Messi because Messi was the best at everything, but through nine games Salah is probably the closest the Premier League has ever seen to Messi: an outlier goal-producer who does all of the little things, too.

He’s 29, and you’ve no doubt heard that his contract expires next year. I’d bet against him keeping this pace up for the entire season because no one has done this in the Premier League before, but we’ve also now seen enough games of it where you’d be an idiot to suggest that he couldn’t keep it going, either. Recent history is, of course, littered with longterm contracts handed out to 29 year olds who almost immediately started to decline once they signed a new deal. You think you’re buying the prime but you’re paying for the dip. That’s because most players peak in their late 20s. It’s just that, as Liverpool are learning and we’re all seeing, there aren’t many players like Mohamed Salah.