Mohamed Salah always wanted to play for Liverpool
Micah Richards has revealed Mohamed Salah always wanted to play for Liverpool, having previously been team-mates with the forward at Fiorentina.
Salah has starred for Liverpool since joining the club from Roma back in 2017, having helped the Reds win the Champions League, Premier League, FA Cup and Carabao Cup. He also now sits third on the club's all-time top scorer list with 243 goals.
Salah surpassed Gordon Hodgson's 241 strikes with his brace in Liverpool's 3-1 win over Southampton on Saturday and Richards has revealed that the 32-year-old "always said his dream was to play for Liverpool".
Speaking on BBC Match of the Day, Richards said: "Salah, we talk about him so many times – he's breathtaking. When I say he's breathtaking it's not because he has a great game all the time, but he scores, he's clinical and he punishes you all the time.
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"I remember when I was at Fiorentina with him, he always said his dream was to play for Liverpool and he's living out his dream now and he's doing amazingly well."
Richards spent one season alongside Salah when he joined Fiorentina on loan in 2014, with the pair becoming very close. When asked what it was like to share a dressing room with Richards, Salah told Sky Sports in 2023: "Oh my god, one of the craziest guys I've ever met.
"As a person, it's hard to describe because we were very close and he's really such a nice guy. My family were in London and he was alone and we would always go for coffee. I didn't have a car, he picked me up always before training and after training to drop me home.
Salah and Micah Richards were teammates for one season at Fiorentina
"He was my driver at the time! And we had such a nice time. He pretended his Italian was better but everybody knows it was not! But he's such a great guy and we were very close and we just stayed in touch."
Salah's future, though, remains up in the air with his Liverpool contract due to expire at the end of the season. It remains to be seen whether he will sign a new deal, having admitted in December that the two parties remain "far away" from reaching an agreement.
"We are far away from that," Salah told Sky Sports. "I don't want to put something in the media and people start saying stuff, but nothing really [has] moved on but for now I'm focused on the team and hopefully we win the Premier League."
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