On the face of it the Egyptian’s new contract has no downside – but this is not entirely a free ride for Arne Slot and the club
Well, that’s good then. Things fall apart. But sometime they also don’t. And the centre does actually hold.
Perhaps the most interesting part of Mohamed Salah’s contract extension at Liverpool is the fact this is a rare crossover story, a signing that steps outside its own tribal margins. There will of course be localised delight. Liverpool fans can look forward to their own lost weekend in the sun, a sense that the good times will now continue to roll, that the time bar has shifted. Return to your seats. This is a lock-in.
More widely, Salah staying is a shot of adrenaline for the Premier League, which is sold on fat, wet personality driven storylines, a star factory that does sometimes have to scrape the walls for actual stars. The commercial logic is obvious. Salah is the league’s best player. Salah is the most famous African footballer. Salah is the biggest sporting star in the Muslim world.
Salah is also a one-man blue-chip brand, instantly recognisable, the beaming, scurrying cartoon squirrel of elite football, his cut-through benevolent and broad. Never mind Liverpool’s global fanbase. Richard Masters will have been doing the running man in his underpants on Friday morning. This is like Disney re-signing Mickey Mouse.
Given the widely trailed nature of the deal it will be necessary now to have takes about the takes, to identify wider points of jeopardy. With this in mind it perhaps won’t be long before some contrarian suggests that if Liverpool’s owners really are the hedge fund sharks of the popular imagination, all vampire teeth, faces thin and glossed as the corporate credit card, they will put Salah up for sale.
Seriously. Sell him to Paris Saint-Germain for £90m this summer. This would be the economically rational decision. Instant gain for the cost of a little ink and some printed sheets. Corporate policy retained. Duty to shareholders observed. Nothing personal kids. It’s always, always business.
This would also be entirely wrong, of course, and for reasons that go beyond armed insurrection in L4. The fact is Liverpool’s executive had no choice. Losing Salah for nothing would have been sackable corporate incompetence. Here is your data outlier, a player with 32 goals and 22 assists this season. Here is your chief branding item, the most followed Premier League player on social media by an absolute mile, a one-man bonus streaming rights deal.
Plus there is a kind of institutional debt here. Salah’s presence over the past eight seasons has defined not just an era of success, the lifting of an emotional cloud, but the owners’ wondrous returns on their financial investment. There is an argument it would make commercial and cultural sense for FSG to pay Salah just to sit in the stands for the next two years, put him on gardening leave, pay him to wave on posters.
So yes, there is no downside on the face of it. Except, this is football, and there must always be variables, lurking doom, potential collapse, all of which are key to the game’s strangely inelastic appeal. The fact is, this is not entirely a free ride. It comes with challenges, not least for Arne Slot.
Signing Salah doesn’t change one key point. With or without him, next season still has to be the start of a rebuild. There was a tendency during the first half of the season, as Slot’s team played with a kind of light around them, to dismiss Jürgen Klopp as a kind of woad-smeared energy guy, to see Slot sifting successfully through the parts, finally bringing order to this first draft of history.
By now it seems clear the current title-bound season is also a hybrid triumph. Slot has overseen the first fix with remarkable skill. But he will now have to effect a more profound building job. For the first time there will be a slight sense of pressure around Salah too.
The football has very clearly not left him, is still clinging to his collar, giddy on the ride. Salah isn’t even very old. It might seem as though he has been around for ever, 10 years since he was skittering down the Chelsea right, peak malevolent José Mourinho up there taking bites on his touchline, but Salah is 32, not 35.
