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Photo by Michael Regan/Getty Images
Salah has shown no signs of slowing down and wants to stay at Liverpool beyond the current season. Now it’s up to the club to get that done.
Liverpool’s new management team led by the returning Michael Edwards as executive of football, Richard Hughes as his sporting director, and Arne Slot as their hand-picked had coach had a rather a quiet summer in the transfer window.
Outside the unexpected arrival of Federico Chiesa from Juventus in the final week, it was a summer selling off spare parts and finding loan homes for promising young players. None of which is the end of the world given the strength of the squad.
The three of them inherited a Liverpool squad—a group that Edwards himself was key to building in his first spell at the club—that is inarguably amongst the best club sides in Europe; comfortably one of the three best in the Premier League.
A quiet summer spent mostly evaluating, then, is fine. What won’t be is if the contract situation surrounding stars Mohamed Salah, Virgil van Dijk, and Trent Alexander-Arnold is allowed to go unresolved—something Salah spoke about on Sunday.
“I had a good summer,” Salah began, before launching unprompted into a brief talk about his contract situation. “I had a long time to try to think because as you know it’s my last year at the club. So I just want to enjoy it; I don’t really want to think about it.
“But I feel free to play my football and we will see about next year. I was coming to the game and I said, ‘It could be my last time [at Old Trafford].’ The club have not talked to me yet so I will play my last season and see at the end of the season.”
Following Salah’s statement, Sky journalist Melissa Reddy confirmed that if Salah does depart at the end of the 2024-25 season, it will be because the club haven’t offered to extend his deal and not because the player himself wants to depart.
Salah has always been keenly aware of his place in the history of football—and in Liverpool’s history. Of the records he sets. Of the fact he is now one of the club’s two top players in the Premier League era and a top five Red in their 100-year-plus history.
On the evidence of last season and the start of this new one under Arne Slot, he’s also nowhere close to done at 32 years of age in a sport that has increasingly begun to see some of its top stars extend their productive careers into their late 30s.
Caution around extending veteran players on large wages may be wise and necessary, but a healthy club at Liverpool’s level also needs to be willing and able to make exceptions. And there is no clearer case of a player who is exception-worthy than Salah.
Even if he drops off a little over the next few years, he will likely remain amongst the best forwards in football. Even if Liverpool extend him and he drops off a little, nobody will say he wasn’t worth the investment worth over the course of his career.
And, more than anything, he has earned the right to continue to play a key role for Liverpool as long as he believes he has it in him. A quiet summer transfer window for Edwards and co. is forgivable. Failing to extend Mohamed Salah’s contract would not be.
He’s one of Liverpool’s all-time greats, and he’s still delivering. He has earned the right to be given a chance to decline if and when he does rather than being denied a deal because a spreadsheet says that he might. It’s time for Liverpool to get it done.
