Hossam Hassan sprang a surprise in Seattle by shifting three players, including Mohamed Salah, into new positions against Belgium, and the move put Egypt’s most important attacker in a different frame on the day he turned 34. Salah was pushed up beside Omar Marmoush, a change that showed how much Egypt were trying to alter the way they attacked.
The timing mattered because this was no routine friendly or dressing-room experiment. Egypt were in a World Cup date with Belgium, still waiting for a first win on that stage and still carrying the weight of a country that has not qualified since 1990. That made any adjustment around Salah feel bigger than a single tactical wrinkle.
There was a logic to it. Egypt went with a shape similar to Argentina’s in possession, which meant the team needed movement, spacing and support rather than one player simply carrying the ball and the idea. Salah can still teach teammates about elite football through the standards he sets, but once a match starts he cannot do all the teaching himself. He needs Emam Ashour, Marwan Attia and Mohamed Hany around him for his best version to appear.
That is the friction in the move and in Salah’s game at 34. He no longer has the speed that once made him such a frightening opponent, and he has tended to operate from the right flank with club and country for nearly a decade. Last season, he was on the periphery in a lot of games for Liverpool, even after Arne Slot re-centralised the attack around Florian Wirtz and did not try Salah as a centre forward despite injuries elsewhere.
Hassan’s choice in Seattle was therefore more than a positional shuffle. It was an admission that Egypt cannot simply hand the ball to Salah and wait for him to decide the match. The question now is whether that three-player switch can become a structure Egypt can trust, or whether it was just a one-night answer to a bigger problem that has followed them since 1990.
For Salah, the comparison that hangs over the discussion is Lionel Messi’s long road. Messi lifted the World Cup in 2022 as Argentina’s captain on his fifth attempt, after years of needing the right players and the right movements around him. Egypt are still trying to build that kind of system, and Seattle showed how far they still have to go.
