For £215m (Or More), It'd Be Insane Not To Sell Mo Salah*

Deep dive on the Salah saga ... (*If he wants to go)

If Mo Salah wants to go to the Saudi league – for status and money, rather than proper football – then I keep coming back to Philippe Coutinho, whose departure (which people accused the owners of being recklessly negligent in rubber-stamping) was the catalyst for Liverpool go to from exciting and flawed to exiting and flawless.

Coutinho was never remotely as good as peak Salah, but he might not have been that different from the Salah of 2023.

Once the final Liverpool game before the Saudi deadline was out of the way, and the international break began, it was a chance for the Saudis, Salah, and Salah’s agent, to confer; to get out of the squad bubble and maybe into a huddle.

First of all, I don’t think the Saudis have come in hard for anyone they didn't already know was willing to join.

As such, logically, there’s a good chance Salah wants to go, based on that fact alone; and that he hasn’t publicly distanced himself (which he doesn’t have to do, but if there’s a zero chance of leaving, you say so.)

That’s a general football trend anyway, to pre-agree terms (you don’t make a massive bid to a club, just to be turned down by the player), so presumably they know Mo would say yes to the right offer.

In Salah’s case, will he push for the move or go on strike?

Or if he does want to go, will he also be fair to Liverpool and only push to leave if Liverpool are ‘happy’ to sell? He’s acted mostly with great dignity – a few sulks aside – during his time at the club, but his agent has been less impressive and at times seemed very immature.

I thought Salah’s goal celebration at the weekend was sheepish. It wasn’t a dramatic winner, so no shirt-off was expected, but he didn’t look as happy as usual. Rather than go to the Kop, in front of which he’d just scored, he turned to teammates; only turning back to give smile-less arms raised, no grins.

I wouldn’t have expected Salah to be telling his teammates he wanted to leave, and I wouldn’t expect Jürgen Klopp to say there’s unrest. I wouldn’t expect the club to say he’s for sale, as you always say someone is ‘not for sale’, in order to drive a harder bargain. (Which doesn’t mean you want to sell; just that if you did, you usually wouldn’t say so in advance. I’m pretty sure Harry Kane was ‘not for sale’ all summer.)

But clearly Project Get Salah is the main Saudi aim of 2023, and if it doesn’t happen this week, we’ll continue to hear about it every day until 2024. That in itself could be detrimental to both the player and to Liverpool FC.

Salah would probably be in my all-time Liverpool XI, in a front three on the right, with John Barnes on the left; Ian Rush up top, Kenny Dalglish as the no.10.

Robbie Fowler, Fernando Torres, Luis Suarez, Roberto Firmino, Michael Owen, Kevin Keegan and various others would probably have to make do with a place on the bench, along with those greats from before my time (plus some I’ve doubtless forgotten); and various others, like Sadio Mané, who loses out simply because he was not John Barnes, and no one was John Barnes.

(Suarez, in the two seasons when he was at his best, was about as good as anyone has ever been, but it was short and sweet, with some not-so-sweet stuff mixed in too; ditto Torres’ brief burning of brilliance.)

So far, Salah has given six scintillating and successful seasons – so, some longevity as well as silverware – but also, looks a fraction slower, and his left-foot curlers are getting weaker, as well as more predictable.

On the other hand, he’s dropping into the no.8 position to play passes into the channel for Darwin Núñez, or for Dominik Szoboszlai to sprint outside like the winger.

Salah is now a smarter, more clever player; but not quite as fast, and his finishing looks less effective.

(He's scored two tap-ins, one from his own missed penalty, and last season his finishing data was the worst of his time at the club. But his creativity is up – albeit the Reds have other creative options if creativity is the main aim.)

To keep him would be to keep a player who can balance the side in different ways; a player still at the top of his game, but on the other side of the great peak.

Plus, an attack on the top four is currently looking capable of being turned into a title challenge, given the two tough away games and the two games played with only 10 men. As Andrew Beasley noted in the post-match thread:

“The last five seasons in which the Reds had at least this total at this point, they challenged for the title: 2008/09, 2013/14, 2018/19, 2019/20 and 2021/22.”

That doesn’t mean the same will follow (past patterns are good for probabilities but never prognostications), but obviously you can be out of the title race these days after four bad games at the start.

Yet £215m or more would allow for some serious squad strengthening; and if Salah were to have his heart set on a move to Saudi, he would already be less committed to Liverpool. (Not that Liverpool need lots of new players, but they still need some.)

My original hunch was that he would want to play in a serious league to achieve (and score) serious goals, but the Saudi league is different from previous new leagues in the sheer scale of its wealth, as well as the efforts they will go to to get the most famous footballing Arab to add further household names to their sportswashing project. It’s cultural, as well as sporting.

Once it was clear that Salah (and maybe as importantly, his agent) could 10x current earnings, and be treated like a literal King, then suddenly you have to be ready for call. This is not a normal approach, a normal seduction. This is a laser-focussed campaign.

That said, this is also a player who has won every single trophy with Liverpool, bar the Europa League (which the Reds weren’t even in until this season, and which is not something Champions League winners aspire to succeed in); and has won Golden Boots and personal awards that are probably beyond him now. (Harry Kane has gone, but Erling Haaland now looms larger than life.)

Does Salah want more of that level of sporting success, which may be more elusive now, or the new kind of exultation that awaits in Arabia?

Already one of the Reds’ best-ever signings – a bona fide Liverpool legend for life – could somehow end up seeing the club quadrupling what it paid for him, right at the point where he’s on the slide.

To pay what is still less than £50m after Premier League inflation and get over £200m for a player of his age is about as good as it gets as a transfer: bargain price; incredible service; insane sale fee.

Remember, Keegan left in his prime, after the Reds were crowned champions of England and Europe in 1977 (the latter for the first time), to become double European Footballer of the Year in Germany. Rush left at his peak (and soon returned).

Torres left at his peak. Suarez left at his peak. Owen left at his peak. Steve McManaman left at his peak, as did Coutinho.

Andriy Voronin left at his peak. (Okay, bad example.)

Some were never as good again; but they left when they seemed terrifyingly irreplaceable, and many proved ... utterly replaceable.

After Keegan came Kenny Dalglish; an upgrade on the seemingly un-upgradable.

After Rush – the best goalscorer the club has ever had, to this day, with 346 goals – came an entire new front three of Barnes, Peter Beardsley and John Aldridge; with British football taken to what was then its highest level, as a new art-form.

Without the loss of Owen there may not have been Torres. After Torres came Suarez. After Coutinho came Alisson and Virgil van Dijk, to rebuild at the other end of the pitch, with the recently-arrived Salah the new star up front.

Strangely, I have less problem with the Saudis coming after Salah and those Reds who have left than I do with talk about someone like Ibrahima Konaté. Players who have yet to serve Liverpool properly are a very different kettle of fish.

Liverpool have clearly had Salah’s best years. There may be a couple more fine ones left in him, but equally, it’s not the 2017/18 Salah, or even the 2021/22 Salah, we’re talking about.

To me, the Saudis can have anyone on the downslope, if those players want out, and if Jürgen Klopp agrees, and the Saudis massively overpay.

(Klopp is also a realist who rarely holds players back; once Coutinho wanted out, it was a case of focussing on how to create a better team, which Klopp did. I often remind people of the terror, hysteria and catastrophising about how Liverpool had sold their chance of success with the deal.)

The main issue now is the timing, and the failure to be able to spend any of the £200m+ that might come in before January (albeit you could line up two or three major transfers, especially with release clauses, and pull the trigger on January 1st; you could be tactically preparing for those players and even communicating ideas to them).

Plus, the weighing up of how much Liverpool would be weakened from mid-September to the end of December without one of its best players, but to me, no longer its very best player.

And a slightly unfocussed and unhappy Salah would likely be even less of the player he once was.

(I’ve always been most open to the deal where Salah is sold now – but moves next summer, as that way everyone is happy within the confines of a compromise, and there’s no more of the distracting saga and speculation that won’t go away if he stays.)

And as things stand, Liverpool have a lot of flexibility and a lot of (fit) options.

All that said, it would be very sad to see half the Reds’ Champions League/Premier League champions plying their trade in the desert, if Salah joins Jordan Henderson, Fabinho, Sadio Mané and Roberto Firmino in the gold rush.

But they are all past their best.

And while I dislike everything about the Saudi league, and have paid no attention to any of the games (just as I avoided the Qatar World Cup), at least it takes these players away from European or Premier League rivals; so as to not have to see them trying to beat Liverpool.

I also think it’s morally okay to leech as much oily money as can be gained, to strengthen Liverpool and financially weaken the buyers (albeit they’d get the ‘priceless’ reflected glory of sportswashing with Salah and co., as they don’t care about cash but cachet).

In the football market, you essentially have to sell players to where they want to go, and you have to sell to reinvest.

The Saudi league has been a godsend in terms of giving the Reds an unexpected financial boost, albeit it’ll be interesting to see if they start trying to unsettle Newcastle’s best players (and not just a flighty winger who was surplus to requirements).

I doubt it, and that then becomes a kind of corrupting force; albeit I felt the fee paid for Allan Saint-Maximin was actually a fair price.

But if the Saudis are going to avoid Newcastle’s best players, due to the clear conflict of interest, that is alarming. You can’t have that situation, as it distorts who gets destabilised and who doesn’t (and at least in the case of Salah and Henderson, the overly long contracts they were given has inadvertently worked wonders; it was designed to appease them, not to mean big fees could be paid for them).

For now, the Saudi spending spree is benefiting Liverpool’s coffers, but I still don’t like the league or its aims.

Still, you can’t really refuse to sell players to any specific league (especially one as suddenly ‘glamorous’ as this), as that would be a restraint of trade, and the market is the market. Selling players is different from selling items, as people choose where they want to go; items do not.

If the Saudis want to massively overspend on Salah to sportswash their project, and Salah wants to go from madly rich to insanely rich (and his agent from very rich to 10x richer), then let them.

But remember, they are not going to obscurity; they are going to the most talked-about, hyped-up league in the world right now; they are going for the status of being wanted that badly, and to be paid that much.

It’s footballing backwater in many senses, but weirdly, the place to be, and be seen, in a chintzy kind of way.

It has a new fashionable status. The ego-bump of being the best-paid amongst the biggest names, even if those names belong to half washed-up stars. The game’s most famous active players remain Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar and Lionel Messi, and the latter is also out of ‘proper’ elite football. The taboo of stepping into retirement-level football at 31 has been removed.

If judged by clout, then hanging out with Ronaldo and Neymar makes sense; the football does not. That said, half Salah’s old teammates have already made the move.

The money is just too good to turn down for Liverpool, I'd say, and presumably Salah feels the same about his wages.

Even with Premier League inflation, I can’t find a fee over £55m* for someone aged 31 or over, when paid for by and English club since 1992.

*Teddy Sheringham to Man Utd, 1997/98, aged 31– £55.1m in 2022 money, so likely to be around £60m in 2023 money, at a guess, once this season's inflation is applied.

At 31, and with the first signs of physically fading, and increasingly likely to be grumpy (for many years I’ve written about what I call the Toxic Rot of the Ageing Superstar), to have enough to guarantee further rebuilding seems a no-brainer.

This, from my last book, covers a bit of it:

Dickheads and Lost Boys, Old Dogs and Egotists, Smart Buys and Starmen

Some time ago I wrote an article entitled “The Toxic Rot of the Ageing Superstar”. The issue is that the superstar demands the ball; and everyone feels that they have to give him the ball, all of the time. Yet he cannot do what he used to do, nor do his teammates – to him, in his warped mind – feel up to his standards. Frustration surges, and he starts moaning. Yet the manager is often too scared to leave the superstar out; and if he does, then the attention it draws then becomes toxic in itself.

Play Ronaldo: you lose the running, the equality, the team spirit, the youthful zest.

Don’t play him: you get a circus.

And while the lateness of the bid is not ideal, the transfer window opens less than three and a half months after the Reds’ next game.

That includes two more international breaks (I assume), and rather than the Champions League, it’s Europa time, anyway. (Plus, Salah would be off to the AFCON in January.)

There is no difficult top-tier group stage to overcome. It’s Thursday nights, against lowly opposition (and likely a chance to blood kids and the squad players, anyway; to play Salah in the group stages would likely be a waste of his energy).

So that’s another thing to consider: Liverpool won’t have to worry about losing the finances and the status of failing in the Champions League group stages, and how important it is, once in it, to progress. The club can finish top four and win the Europa League, by taking it more seriously in the spring.

Losing an icon would hurt the club financially (and it’s always sad, in its own way), but younger, committed players can help drive the Reds back into the top four; and become the icons that Salah – arriving as a Chelsea reject who had done pretty well in Italy – became only once he arrived at Anfield.

I don’t think you can catastrophise the losing of someone’s legs on someone else’s pitch, when they're choosing to go.

Younger fans may not remember the wisdom of Bob Paisley (whose saying I just paraphrased), but rarely has a man – a quiet, avuncular, verbal bumbler of a man who wore a cardigan and slippers when going to sign expensive players – been so smart and ahead of his time; and so right about virtually every call he made regarding buying and selling players over nine-year period; a period that saw the Reds win six league titles and three European Cups (or Champions Leagues, to those who may not realise they are the same thing), in addition to various other trophies.

Paisley was perhaps the world’s only plaid-clad granddad savant, who talked of doings and gubbins and whatshisnames and what have yous, but just made football decisions that have never been matched; with a logic that still largely applies today.

Different times, but what would Bob have done?

And if Liverpool were to sell Salah, what would happen next? Who can fill the gap, until Christmas and then beyond?

Part Two: Where Next?

The second part of this article is for paying subscribers only, and includes assessments of the Reds’ strikers and their finishing prowess.