Harvey Elliott has praised the impact that Mo Salah has had on his career at Liverpool and how the Egyptian helped him to settle in at Anfield.
He was only 16 years old when, in the summer of 2019, he left Fulham for a Reds team which had just won the Champions League and racked up an incredible 97-point tally in the Premier League.
Now on the verge of his 22nd birthday, he gave thanks to the senior professionals at Anfield for the advice and support they offered to him when he first came to Merseyside.
Elliott ‘surprised’ by Salah’s humility
Elliott spoke with Ben Foster in a feature for Amazon Prime Video Sport when he lauded Salah for doing so much to help him bed in at Liverpool and for his ongoing pointers.
The Reds’ number 19 said of the Egyptian: “He’s done everything. I was kind of surprised, to be honest, because of the greatness of who he is and what he’s achieved in football.
“I was a bit nervous at the start because you don’t really know how these big players are going to react, and it was the first time I’ve been around superstars. They can see how hard it is for youngsters to come in, especially being really young and trying to establish yourself in the first team.
“He was giving me pointers of what I needed to do, how I needed to do things like the philosophy of how we play and what the manager wants, even to this day.
“He and I have a really close connection now. It’s more like a friendship than him just trying to help me out. The way he’s handled me and put me on the path to get where I am today…he’s just amazing.”
Elliott seized his moment against PSG last week
Elliott’s insight on Salah speaks volumes for what the Egyptian King is like not just as a footballer but also as a teammate.
It must’ve been incredibly daunting for our current number 19 to come into Liverpool as a 16-year-old and try to earn the respect of such a high-achieving group of players, but it’s to his and their credit that he’s long since successfully integrated into the Reds’ first-team squad.
Clearly he’s worked tirelessly to make himself part of the furniture at Anfield, a transition which also appears to have been helped by the selfless encouragement of established professionals who’d won the biggest prize in European club football.
Arne Slot has admitted that he’d like to play Elliott more often, only for the intense level of competition within the squad, and the player recently voiced his frustration at not being selected to start more often.
Were it not for the consistent brilliance of Salah over the past few years, the 21-year-old would likely have had far more starts on Liverpool’s right flank, although he seized his moment with the late winner against Paris Saint-Germain last week within a minute of coming on for the Egyptian.
For teenagers starting out in elite-level football – especially at a club of LFC’s standing – it must mean the world to have genuine global superstars taking them under their wing and imparting such valuable advice and support.
