Mohamed Salah was back at Liverpool’s Kirkby training complex on Sunday afternoon. How much longer it remains his base is shrouded in doubt.
The Egyptian attacker was involved in a light session indoors with the other members of Arne Slot’s squad who didn’t feature in Saturday’s 3-3 draw with Leeds United.
For Liverpool, there was a sense of letting the dust settle following the incendiary post-match interview Salah gave at Elland Road, but some huge decisions lie ahead.
The most imminent is whether to include Salah, the third-highest goalscorer in the club’s history, in their travelling party for Tuesday’s Champions League clash with Inter.
The squad are scheduled to train at Kirkby at 11.45am UK time on Monday before flying from Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport to Italy. Slot will conduct his pre-match press conference at San Siro at 6.45pm UK time. It promises to be a media circus with one topic dominating the conversation, regardless of whether Salah is there or not.
Salah spent part of Sunday deep in discussions with his Dubai-based representative Ramy Abbas after he responded to being left out of the team for three successive games by accusing Liverpool of “throwing him under the bus” and making him a scapegoat for their struggles this season. He revealed that his relationship with Slot had broken down and claimed that “someone doesn’t want me in the club” as he left the door open to a possible January exit.
The Athletic has spoken to a number of sources with knowledge of the situation, who asked to remain anonymous to protect relationships, and can reveal:
- It wasn’t a complete surprise to senior figures at Liverpool that Salah spoke out, but his attack on the club and Slot went further than anyone anticipated.
- Some team-mates were braced for it, having noticed a change in Salah’s mood on Friday after he was informed by Slot that he would be on the bench at Leeds.
- Liverpool’s owner, Fenway Sports Group, retains complete faith in Slot despite this latest controversy and poor recent results.
- Liverpool regarded his recent spell out of the team as a temporary measure rather than the end of him as a regular starter.
- There is strong interest from the Saudi Pro League and Major League Soccer clubs if Salah does seek a move after representing Egypt in the Africa Cup of Nations over the next month.
This is the story of how a remarkable 48 hours at Liverpool unfolded, what sparked it, and what might happen next.
The overriding feeling at Liverpool, two days after one of the most explosive interviews by a high-profile player in Premier League history, is one of shock.
Rewind to April and Salah was celebrating winning the Premier League title at Anfield, praising Slot for helping him hit such heights. Two months earlier, Abbas had posted on social media that Slot was “excellent at his job”.
“I told him, ‘As long as you rest me defensively, I will provide offensively’,” Salah told Sky Sports in April. “He listened a lot and you can see the numbers.”
Salah not only won the Premier League Golden Boot with 29 league goals, but also walked away with the Playmaker award after contributing 18 league assists. He broke the record for most goal involvements over a 38-game Premier League season and was crowned both Football Writers’ Association Footballer of the Year and Professional Footballers’ Association Player of the Year.
Like everyone connected with Liverpool, Salah has found life considerably tougher this season. The tragic loss of Diogo Jota hit him especially hard and a summer of sweeping changes in the squad after a £450million ($600m) spending spree also altered the dynamics within the squad.
In September, a post from a fan account on X boasting about the upgrade of going from Luis Diaz and Darwin Nunez to Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak prompted Salah to reply: “How about we celebrate the great signings without disrespecting the PL champions?” It provided a glimpse into his psyche.
Salah felt that the team last season was built around getting the best out of him and he loved playing alongside Diaz, Nunez and Trent Alexander-Arnold, who all departed. Liverpool have tried to play a different way since the arrival of Wirtz, Isak and Hugo Ekitike, and he has found it much harder to get into areas where he can score, registering only four goals in the Premier League so far this season.
His struggles have been obvious to those who know Salah well. On Friday, before Salah spoke at Leeds, the Egyptian national manager Hossam Hassan told The Athletic at the World Cup draw that he had been in regular contact with the forward during this difficult run.
“Mo is a big player and he has a good mentality,” he said. “Many times before, he had a problem and changes his club. But if he comes with me, we can move (forwards) together and forget any problems in his club. He is the best player in the world in his role.”
For all his struggles with form, there was no suggestion of any cracks in his bond with Slot as he started the opening 12 league matches of this season.
Things only changed when he was dropped at West Ham United eight days ago. His mood darkened further when he wasn’t recalled at home to Sunderland in midweek, but it was being kept on the bench throughout Saturday’s game at Leeds that made him snap.
If Liverpool had held on to win 3-2 at Elland Road, it’s hard to envisage that he would have taken the gloss off a morale-boosting victory by launching such a visceral attack. But with emotions running high after seeing another two points frittered away, he decided to unleash.
Leeds celebrate their dramatic equaliser against Liverpool (Molly Darlington/Getty Images)
Senior club figures knew that with every game Salah was out of the team, the chances of him speaking out increased. His ego and his mindset are part of what makes him an elite force, and he was never going to keep quiet about what he perceived to be an injustice.
But the view within Liverpool is that it was simply a selection decision from Slot based on what was best for the team after such a bleak run of results, and that nobody behind the scenes has been trying to force Salah out. They regarded his absence from the team as a short-term fix and not a sign that he had been relegated to the role of backup.
Slot has sought to make Liverpool more compact and less easy to play through, and decided to do that by shifting Dominik Szoboszlai into Salah’s place wide on the right, given the Hungarian’s greater work off the ball. There is a belief internally that with one win and two draws from the past three games that the change has been effective, with Liverpool conceding few opportunities.
The Dutchman also had to come up with a plan for how Liverpool would operate while Salah is away at AFCON and felt it made sense to try it before the 33-year-old left for the tournament, which starts in Morocco on December 21.
If Salah was trying to crank up the pressure on Slot and make his position untenable — which is the view of several people spoken to by The Athletic for the purposes of this article, with one calling it a “calculated” assault — he is set to be disappointed. The Dutchman retains the support of FSG and sacking a manager on the back of a player challenging a selection decision is unthinkable, no matter how iconic the player being left out happens to be.
There is also plenty of sympathy for Slot, given he has been at pains to protect Salah when quizzed about his absence from the team during press conferences. “Mo has been so outstanding for this club for so many years and will be for us in the future,” Slot said before the game against Sunderland. “Of course, a player is not happy he isn’t playing. But the way he behaved is what you would expect from the professional he is. He was very supportive of his team-mates, handled himself really well.”
Salah commands respect and admiration in the Liverpool dressing room, but has few close friends within it. Team-mates sensed an immediate change in his mood when he found out on Friday that he was not starting against Leeds. Given his history, they knew that he would publicly vent his anger sooner rather than later, and there was no sense of shock when they read his comments late on Saturday night.
It actually took the spotlight away from the disastrous manner in which they had surrendered 2-0 and 3-2 leads. Suddenly, no one was talking about Ibrahima Konate’s latest blunder.
What kind of impact will his outburst have on the squad? “Honestly, not much,” the agent of one senior Liverpool player says. “After everything he’s done for the club, I don’t think anyone can say anything to Mo.”
Back on April 10, the man nicknamed the ‘Egyptian King’ by Liverpool supporters sat on a golden throne in the centre circle under the floodlights at Anfield as he filmed an announcement video for LFCTV.
The following morning, the news broke that he had signed a new two-year deal until summer 2027. Salah explained that his daughter Makka was “the happiest one in the family” because she didn’t want to move away from her school friends.
“I had my best years here,” he said. “I played eight years, hopefully it’s going to be 10. I signed the contract because I believe we can win a lot of big trophies together.”
Salah later revealed during an interview with Gary Neville for Sky Sports that at the start of the season, he had thought there was just a 10 per cent chance of him staying at Liverpool beyond 2025.
“We know the philosophy of the club. I’m not attacking them, I know how they dealt with their players over 30 in the past,” he said. “I didn’t expect that I’d stay. From January, I think onwards, it was like: ‘OK, things are getting better and better’. It took us a while. I think the club was testing me to see if I could still provide or not!”
Salah lifts the Premier League trophy in May (Michael Regan/Getty Images for the Premier League)
The path to an agreement between Liverpool sporting director Richard Hughes and Salah’s representative, Abbas, a Colombian lawyer, was far from straightforward. Abbas prefers to do business face-to-face rather than on the phone. The note on his WhatsApp profile warns: “Voice notes ignored. If you’re late, I will leave.”
There were times when Abbas was concerned that the club would not be prepared to maintain Salah’s status as one of the world’s highest-paid players on around £400,000 per week, plus performance-related bonuses. There had also been friction during the previous contract renewal process in 2022 when Salah doubted how badly they wanted to keep him before FSG president Mike Gordon stepped in to help broker a compromise.
Throughout last season, Slot made it clear behind the scenes how much he wanted to retain Salah’s services. Most fans felt the same, with a banner appearing on the Kop featuring an image of Salah doing his bow and arrow goal celebration with the message: ‘FSG. He fires a bow. Now give Mo his dough’.
For FSG’s CEO of football, Michael Edwards, and Hughes, it needed to make financial sense. Ultimately, they decided that his astonishing numbers merited such an outlay. With the saga dragging on until April, they effectively had almost another full season of data to call upon, which gave them peace of mind. His return of 0.48 assists per 90 minutes in the Premier League in 2024-25 was the best of his career, and with 0.77 goals per 90, he hadn’t been so prolific since 2017-18. Salah had more shots (130) than any other top-flight player and also created the most chances (86) from open play.
Richard Hughes handled contract talks with Salah’s camp (Catherine Ivill – AMA/Getty Images)
At the time, it looked like a no-brainer. That looks less true now.
The protracted nature of contract talks did result in some public spats, notably with former Liverpool defender turned TV pundit Jamie Carragher, who branded him “selfish” after Salah told reporters he was “more out than in” last November before crunch games against Real Madrid and Manchester City. Salah later accused Carragher of being “obsessed” with him on social media.
On Saturday night, Salah name-checked him again: “Tomorrow, Carragher is going to criticise me, but that’s fine.”
In the end, Carragher kept his counsel during Sky’s Premier League coverage on Sunday. That is set to change when he appears on Monday Night Football this evening.
Carragher is aware that his public criticisms occasionally go down badly in the Liverpool dressing room. Indeed, Andy Robertson playfully suggested in an interview on CBS, where Carragher is a pundit, that he had “got a bit of stick” among the squad after calling Salah selfish. Carragher, for his part, takes the view that he is simply calling things as he sees them.
So what happens now?
Much depends on whether Edwards and Hughes can broker some kind of peace deal or whether the point of no return has already been reached. If Salah really is intent on leaving, then it’s simply a case of getting the best possible deal in the January window and reinvesting the proceeds on a replacement, such as Bournemouth’s Antoine Semenyo.
In the summer of 2023, Liverpool rejected a bid of £150m from Saudi Pro League club Al Ittihad. Interest from the Middle East in Salah has only grown since and the view from various Saudi football sources spoken to by The Athletic is that Al Hilal have the resources to do a deal for Salah.
Moving to Saudi would have significant financial benefits for Salah, but it would also represent a significant step down from competing in the Premier League and Champions League.
Salah has also previously been reluctant to turn his back on the Premier League. He is happy and settled in Cheshire with his wife Magi and their two daughters.
If he looks to make a move to the U.S., there are a few teams that make sense. The 2025 expansion side San Diego FC, owned by Egyptian-British billionaire Mohamed Mansour, could try to entice his countryman to a team that finished first in the Western Conference in its inaugural season.
San Diego has an academy-focused approach, but when asked about attracting global stars, Mansour recently told The Athletic, “We’re always looking to improve. We will do whatever it takes as owners to support the San Diego Football Club.”
Mohamed Mansour, owner of San Diego, could be interested in a deal for Salah (Orlando Ramirez/Getty Images)
While many may connect Salah to Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami, which has a designated player spot, a source with direct knowledge of the 2025 MLS Cup champions’ plan says they already have a target in place to fill the spot left by the retirement of Jordi Alba.
Another option is the Chicago Fire, which has also had an eye on signing a global star. Chicago pursued Neymar before the Brazilian star returned to his home club, Santos, and were also in the running to sign Kevin De Bruyne, until the Belgian opted to join Napoli.
Owner Joe Mansueto has the ability to spend big, and a source briefed on discussions tells The Athletic that the Fire made an attempt to sign Salah before he re-signed with Liverpool in April. It would make sense that Chicago would look to approach again.
In the short term, AFCON beckons for Salah and his absence from Merseyside — potentially until late-January, if Egypt reach the final — will give all parties the chance to take stock.
Whether that will be enough time for the wounds caused by Saturday’s events in West Yorkshire to heal is another matter.
Additional reporting: Gregg Evans, Simon Hughes, Paul Tenorio, Mario Cortegana Santos, Oliver Kay, Adam Crafton
