Liverpool's Salah Succession Plan: Ibrahim Mbaye Emerges as Key Target
Mohamed Salah walked out of Anfield this summer leaving behind a goalscoring legacy that will stalk whoever comes next on Liverpool’s right flank. One of the greatest forwards in the club’s history has gone. The hole is obvious. The clock is ticking.
And yet, less than three weeks before the new season kicks off, Liverpool still have no natural right-winger in the squad.
That is not a minor detail. It’s a glaring structural issue for a team built for years around Salah’s left foot, his gravity in the final third, his relentlessness. The right-hand side has gone from Liverpool’s most predictable source of goals to a puzzle with missing pieces.
Jeremie Frimpong can operate high and wide, but he is not truly a winger and, with Conor Bradley injured, he is needed at right-back. Bradley Barcola has been linked and brings genuine excitement, but he operates on the opposite flank. None of this solves the basic question: who starts on the right on opening day?
For weeks, it has felt like Liverpool were trying to improvise their way through a structural rebuild. Now, at last, there is a name that looks like a plan rather than a patch.
Ibrahim Mbaye
On Tuesday evening, reports emerged that Liverpool want the 18-year-old Senegalese talent and that talks are expected to begin imminently. Fabrice Hawkins has reported genuine interest from the club, while Fabrizio Romano has indicated that the player himself is keen on the move.
This is not a short-term plaster. This is a shot at a future cornerstone.
Mbaye is only 18. No serious club hands him Salah’s shirt and says, “Off you go, replace a Premier League legend,” from day one. He is not that signing. Not yet. But he is precisely the profile Liverpool have been scouring a thin market to find: a right-sided attacker with the raw tools to grow into a world-class force.
And the right-wing market is brutal right now. Proven, elite-level options are scarce and wildly expensive. Clubs are hanging on to what they have. Anyone even close to Salah’s profile is either unavailable or priced at a level that makes even the Premier League’s heavyweights hesitate.
That is why Mbaye matters.
Liverpool know that if you cannot buy the finished article, you go earlier in the talent cycle and back your development structure. You identify the teenager who might, with time and coaching, become the player everyone else will be desperate to sign in three years’ time.
By all accounts, Mbaye fits that bracket. An 18-year-old Senegal star with the kind of high ceiling that makes recruitment departments lean forward. He has the explosiveness, the technical quality and the one-v-one threat that, if harnessed properly, could turn him into a genuine world-beater.
Liverpool understand the stakes. You do not “replace” Salah in the strict sense. You build the next era around someone who can carry a different kind of threat, on the same patch of grass, with the same level of fear in defenders’ eyes.
Right now, the squad does not contain that player. There is no natural heir on the right, no obvious internal solution. The interest in Mbaye changes the conversation. It offers a route to a long-term answer rather than another season of compromise and makeshift selections.
This is not about having a like-for-like clone of the Egyptian. It is about securing a worthy successor: a young forward with the courage and quality to grow into the role, to handle the expectation that comes with occupying Salah’s old territory.
Liverpool have long admired Mbaye. Now the admiration is edging towards action. If the move happens, it will not instantly solve the problem of who starts on the right in August. But it could solve a far bigger question.
Who leads Liverpool’s right flank into the next decade?
