1 year ago
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Photo by Andrew Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images
The club are not willing to consider the sale of their star forward on deadline day but the Saudi Pro League appear to be fuzzy on what no means.
The Saudi Pro League’s puzzling late effort to sign Mohamed Salah on behalf of Al-Ittihad have seen the state-backed league offer Liverpool a base offer of £100 plus add-ons over the past 24 hours but the approach was rejected out of hand by the club.
Liverpool are said to consider the case closed and to not be interested in considering his sale at any price with just hours left to run in the summer transfer window for Premier League sides, but that might not stop Pro League representatives trying again.
Salah remains Liverpool’s best player, one of the game’s top five attackers, and his status as the game’s most prominent Muslim player makes him additionally appealing to the Pro League. Add all that up and it’s hard to see their bid as anything but derisory.
With the transfer window closing and no opportunity to replace him should they sell, any offer would have to cross well over into the realm of preposterous—and having bid £250M for Kylian Mbappe, the Pro League have shown they can do preposterous.
A bid in the £100M or even £150M region isn’t that, not in a summer when Harry Kane joined Bayern Munich for that sort of fee—and when Bayern are a club and not, as is the case here, a nation-state negotiating and proposing to pay on behalf of a club.
Salah, meanwhile, has kept his head down over the past week with the player and his agent avoiding comment on rumours of Saudi interest, and even faced with a truly preposterous fee here it might take Salah agitating to maybe get a move across the line.
