Mohamed Salah has opened up on his love for chess and how it is helping him set goalscoring records for Liverpool but admits most of his team-mates are not big fans of the game

He is well used to checkmating defenders – but Mohamed Salah says he is Liverpool’s undoubted chess grandmaster.

In between breaking goalscoring records for Liverpool and contributing assists, Salah loves to play chess. He says he plays seven or eight games a day and claims no-one at Anfield can match him.

“The way I’m addicted to chess is insane,” he said.

“I play almost every day, not less than seven or eight games and sometimes more. I don’t know if it develops something in my game or not, but it makes you think strategically.

“I just love to play chess. Trent [Alexander-Arnold] plays, but I’m the best by far. There’s no-one in the team who can be close. I’m serious. I’m not being arrogant, but the rest are really bad, all of them.”

Salah, 31, has 22 goals and 12 assists in his 34 appearances for Liverpool this season, meaning he has at least had a hand in a goal in every game he has played. The Egyptian king had a very rare off night against Sheffield United and has substituted before the hour mark after the Blades had levelled.

Speaking before Thursday’s game, Salah claimed he visualises at least 90 per cent of his goals in his head. “There are a lot of things to think about, a lot of things you want to achieve and a lot of situations you want to experience before it happens, so when it happens, you’re not surprised, you feel you’ve had that experience,” he said.

“Sometimes you need to trick your brain to just lie to yourself so your brain doesn’t make a difference between the real thing or a fake thing. So you keep going into the process, you keep lying to yourself until you believe the idea and put it into your brain.

“Ninety per cent of my goals, I visualise in my head, or even more. You just visualise what you want to happen and you keep repeating it and repeating it.”

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Salah is incredibly fit and his six-week lay-off for his two hamstring issues were his longest spell on the sidelines during his seven years at Anfield. He works in the gym every day, and sometimes at home, and says he wished he knew at 18 how important the mental side of his game is.

“If there’s one piece of advice I wish I could have had at 18, it’s that the work you do mentally is more difficult than the work you do physically,” he said. “I work in the gym almost every day for one-and-half hours and sometimes I go home and work again, but it’s hard to keep working on your mental thing for 15 minutes a day.

“It’s so hard, it’s tricky, trust me, because I’ve been doing it for a few years and sitting by yourself alone and visualising is much harder than doing the gym every day for one-and-a-half hours.”