Mohamed Salah is set to leave Liverpool this summerplaceholder image
Mohamed Salah is set to leave Liverpool this summer | Getty Images
Mohamed Salah is leaving Liverpool - but have the club handled his departure the right way?
Everyone knew it was coming, even if the timing of the announcement was, perhaps, something of a surprise: Mohamed Salah, one of Liverpool’s greatest players of the Premier League era, will leave Anfield at the end of the season after a glittering career.
There will be endless (richly deserved) eulogies to an outstanding career over the coming months, and plenty of time for fans to bid a very fond farewell to a player whose immense talent and hundreds of goals have defined the last decade of the top flight and been the primary source of Liverpool’s recent successes. For now, however, the real question concerns whether the club have handled Salah’s departure the right way – and indeed whether they should have let this all play out a year ago…
Were Liverpool right to keep Mohamed Salah last summer?
As it turns out, Liverpool were damned either way when they made the decision to extend Salah’s contract last summer. Having chosen to continue paying him a steepling £400,000 per week, they got to watch his slow and expensive decline in real time. Had they let him leave on a free transfer, however, then the board would have been pilloried for letting him leave amid this season’s poor results. There was no right answer.
Ultimately, Liverpool probably made the right decision to offer him another two years given the information that was available. Granted, Salah’s form had already started to fail towards the end of the 2024/25 campaign, but there was no hard evidence that his drop-off last spring was anything more than a blip – and the upside, had the Egyptian stayed anywhere near the top of his game, was that they could have had one of the best wingers in the world on the books.
That wasn’t the case, and Salah’s late-season regression only sped up. He seems to have lost his burst of acceleration, his sharpness and his ruthlessness. Age has finally caught up with a great. But nobody could blame Liverpool for failing to foresee such a sharp decline.
It’s also unreasonable to have anticipated the rather sudden breakdown of the relationship between Salah and Arne Slot. Salah told the press that he felt he had been “thrown under a bus” after Slot began to bench him. It was an unexpected fit of pique and pride from a player who had seldom betrayed an excessive ego in the past.
Those seemingly burned bridges were mended quickly enough to keep Salah on side for the rest of the season, but between that dust-up and his on-field struggles, his departure in the summer seemed entirely inevitable.
Throw in the fact that he was being paid a vast salary, and the justification for trying to keep him into next season starts to look rather thin. Club legend though he may be, it is plain that it’s time to cut ties and move on, for the sake of both the dressing room and the team’s performances.
Keeping him last summer was the best decision at the time (as it was with Virgil van Dijk, who is experiencing his own more gradual decline) and letting him leave now is too. The only real question left is whether letting him leave on a free is the correct decision too.
Why Liverpool may be going about Salah’s departure the wrong way
Liverpool have agreed to let Salah leave halfway through his two-year contract to facilitate his departure, but that decision begs a question – why not wait and attempt to get a transfer fee out of it?
The most likely destination for Salah is the Saudi Pro League. Their ‘big four’ – the teams directly funded by the Saudi Public Investment Fund – have had Salah in their sights for some time. As the greatest (and most high profile) Arab and Muslim player in the world, he would be the crown jewel of the Saudi project if he signed.
Those clubs are scarcely short of cash. Not only are they likely to continue to pay Salah a massive wage, but they could surely have stumped up a few million to make it worth Liverpool’s while to let him go. In allowing him to break his contract, Liverpool may have turned down millions.
Salah may end up elsewhere, of course. There are, for instance, a few MLS sides who might be prepared to meet his wage demands but who may not have opened up their chequebooks for a significant transfer fee. But the most likely scenario is that Liverpool have decided to let him leave on a free transfer in order to avoid further drama.
Had they opted to hang on in the hope of getting a fee, then negotiations could easily have dragged out over the course of the summer, with no guarantee of a satisfactory resolution – and as Liverpool discovered with Alexander Isak, a prolonged and acrimonious transfer saga isn’t always a pleasant experience.
Letting him leave this summer without the wrangling also honours and respects the wishes of a great player who has given the club so much that it may be argued that it’s only fair to pave his way out of the club. It could be said that it’s a matter of respect. But it’s also a matter of millions.
Liverpool have plenty of work to do this summer in order to get their squad up to code. They risk losing Ibrahima Konaté and Andrew Robertson on free transfers and will need to spend significant sums to redevelop their defence, while there is also a pressing need for fresh blood in midfield and in attack – not to mention that they will now also need to find Salah’s long-term replacement.
That’s going to be expensive, and it’s surprising that Liverpool’s owners, the Fenway Sports Group, are apparently happy to turn down a cash injection in order to facilitate their continued rebuild. The old profit and sustainability rules may be on the way out, but the new Premier League spending rules will still provide some constraints – although losing Salah’s £400,000 per week pay packet will offer some relief on its own.
Liverpool are right to let Salah leave this summer. That much is undeniably true. Whether they are going about it the right way from a business perspective is rather more debatable, and only the results of their summer transfer window will determine whether they have got this call correct. If they end up falling short in their goal of building a squad that can challenge for the Premier League and the Champions League, then perhaps the question of how they’ve handled Salah’s situation will be raised again.
For now, however, all that can be done is to prepare for a long farewell to one of the club’s best players of the modern era. However things pan out over the next couple of seasons, Salah will go down as a true great of top-flight football, and it’s fair to say that Liverpool would have rather less silverware to their name if they hadn’t had him around. Things won’t feel quite the same without him.
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