Forget Haaland, the Norwegian who is Salah's new rival to beat

Mohamed Salah, as well as being one of the best footballers in the Premier League, has recently confessed in an interview published by Sky Sports that he is an absolute chess addict. "I play chess, in fact I'm hooked on chess, and I play literally every day". Surprisingly, despite this curious addiction, he has left hardly any clues about it on his social networks: just a photograph with one of his daughters playing chess and another, more recent one, in which he is seen enjoying a game of backgammon, another well-known strategy board game.

"You move, Padawan," the Egyptian footballer wrote almost three years ago to his daughter, whom he was teaching to play. And like poker, Salah plays a lot of online games. Salah did not reveal exactly which apps or websites he uses to play chess games. And, it seems, he sometimes uses a fairly recognisable nickname: "I put my name with some numbers so that some people would ask me 'are you Mo Salah? I would say 'yes, you don't believe me', 'you're a liar', they would say, and I would say 'yes, I'm lying to you'".

Salah is a good chess player: "I'm not Magnus but I'm good". In fact, he has an ELO rating of 1400. "I have no chance of beating Magnus but hopefully I can play against him," he confessed. Well, it's all said and done. The World Chess Champion reacted to him on social media. In fact, the Norwegian later added a link to the interview to put his social media fans in context about the greeting on his Twitter/X account.

Salah's rivalry with Haaland

While Salah already sees Magnus as his new rival to beat even Erling Haaland, after the match against Liverpool, Haaland maintains a goal expectancy of 13.40 and on average scores a goal every 80 minutes, averaging one per game played. However, with 14 Premier League goals this season and with the first half of the campaign in Europe nearing its conclusion, the Norwegian is in the top three scorers in the continent's top leagues, but is not the leader, although if he keeps it up, he could end up surpassing his opponents.