With Mo Salah‘s contract becoming the hot topic again as he enters the final 10 months of his current terms, agreeing a new deal should be a no brainer for Liverpool.
Speaking after Liverpool’s third win from three to kickstart the Arne Slot era, Salah explained that he felt they were back to playing the type of football they did seven years ago under Jurgen Klopp.
“It’s not a big difference, because with Jurgen the first few years were always like this, we tried to win the ball as high as possible,” Salah told Sky Sports following his goal and two assists in the 3-0 victory at Man United.
“Then with time we managed to change our system or the way we played.
“It’s quite similar to like seven years ago, but I think the manager has his own system and we all try to adapt to that.”
For this writer, those words evoked memories of a pre-season trip to Germany, and a 3-0 friendly win over Bayern Munich that saw the newly signed Salah score in one of his first outings for the club.
Salah then netted in his first competitive appearance for Liverpool – a 3-3 draw at Watford that showed the best and the worst of Klopp’s early years.
Why has Salah’s contract situation come to this?
Few knew quite what to expect of the shaggy-haired Egyptian upon his arrival from AS Roma for £43.9 million – though comparisons with Juan Cuadrado were clearly wide of the mark even at the time – but even fewer could have predicted what was to come.
Seven years on, Salah is the Reds’ fifth-highest goalscorer of all time, with 214 goals in 352 games – including his 92 assists, he has averaged a goal contribution every 93 minutes.
His sensational rise has seen him break record after record, winning seven trophies, and this season should see him leapfrog Billy Liddell in Liverpool’s goalscoring charts and potentially four other players into the Premier League‘s all-time top five.
A blistering start to the new campaign has brought three goals and three assists in three outings, and he appears to be relishing breaking out of his “comfort zone” under new head coach Slot.
That all makes the fact his contract has been allowed to run into its final 10 months – and, according to Salah himself, with no contact over an extension so far – particularly baffling.
This can be largely explained by the scale of upheaval Liverpool faced off the pitch over the past two years, starting with Julian Ward tendering his resignation in November 2022.
Ward had played an integral role in negotiating Salah’s current contract, one which made him the best-paid player in the history of the club, but not long after that the sporting director decided his time was up.
That was followed by the appointment of a short-term replacement in Jorg Schmadtke and the shock news that Jurgen Klopp himself planned to depart the club.
Klopp’s resignation led to a full-scale restructure of the club at board level, with Fenway Sports Group remodelling their setup after ceding more and more responsibility to their legendary manager.
In the latter years of his reign, Klopp’s fingerprints were on almost everything, but that and the lack of stability in the recruitment sector saw new contracts for Salah, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Virgil van Dijk seemingly take a backseat.
An almighty task
That has left new sporting director Richard Hughes and the returning Michael Edwards with a major issue to address – having already presided over appointing Klopp’s successor and then helping reshape and strengthen Slot’s squad.
It has been claimed that a focus on the transfer market had seen any negotiations over contract extensions temporarily shelved.
But if Salah’s assertion that the club had not yet been in touch with neither he nor his representative, Ramy Abbas Issa, is to be believed, it still seems negligent to say the least.
Of course, given the high profile of any proposed deal internal politics can be expected, and Salah is not averse to harnessing the powers of the media in order to strengthen his hand.
He did so before Liverpool presented him his £350,000-a-week contract in 2022 and this time he is working to do the same, not least with the uproar among supporters concerned about losing one of the club’s best-ever players for free next summer.
A cold, analytical recruitment staff will not be swayed by any emotional pull, however, and it is fair to say any reservations over handing a top-earning 32-year-old fresh terms are justified.
But Salah is not, for example, Casemiro, a player who will also turn 33 next year and is floundering on the pitch at Man United while taking home a reported wage in the region of £300,000 per week.
There are no signs of Salah experiencing a similar level of decline; on the contrary, it could even be argued that, as Andy Robertson put it, the Egyptian is getting better with age.
Salah is not slowing down
He may have lost a yard of pace and last season suffered the longest injury layoff of his senior career, but Salah remain in impeccable shape and is adding more strings to his bow in a new system under Slot.
Salah is still a potent goalscorer but he has developed into an elite-level creator, too, and despite a lengthy spell out with a hamstring injury still finished last season as Liverpool’s top goalscorer and assist-maker with 25 goals and 14 assists in 44 games.
He is relentless in improving his fitness, so much so that he has joked that his “house looks like a hospital” after installing hyperbaric and cryotherapy chambers, and he has begun the new campaign covering more distance per game than in any of the previous three seasons.
Even if he will turn 33 by the time this current deal is up, and would be 35 when a hypothetical two-year extension ran out, Salah is not your average footballer.
He is more Cristiano Ronaldo, still firing at 39, than Mido, Salah’s fellow Egyptian – retired at 30 – who criticised his decision to leave their Africa Cup of Nations camp to undergo specialist treatment on his mid-tournament injury.
Liverpool’s decision-makers should be under no illusions they are working with a freak athlete with generational output, universal appeal and a overriding affinity with the club and city.
And with Salah having made his desire to stay at Anfield clear, signing him up to a new long-term deal should be a no brainer.
Fan Comments