Everyone is saying "no," but for how long?
After Sunday's win over Aston Villa, Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp said what he'd been saying all week: "I never had any doubt about his commitment to this club. You can't imagine how much fuss the world has made, but how calm we are with it. He is our player and wants to play here."
His agent echoed similar thoughts: "If we considered leaving LFC this year, we wouldn't have renewed the contract last summer."
The man of the match, Dominik Szoboszlai, who's only been employed by the club for 60-ish days, even threw his thoughts out there. "You know it is football, everyone is talking," he said. "We are really happy that he has stayed. We are of course speaking between each other but he wants to stay, he wants to be here and be with us. We are really happy -- we need people in the team like him."
Of course, they're all talking about Mohamed Salah, the Liverpool legend and one of the five or 10 best players in the history of the Premier League. A bid from Al Ittihad, one of the four Saudi league clubs directly funded by the nation's trillion-dollar Public Investment Fund (PIF), arrived Friday -- the final day of the summer transfer window -- in the region of $190 million (£150m). Liverpool rejected the offer, but with the Saudi window open until Thursday, it's unlikely that number just stays there. It'd already be the second-highest fee ever paid for a single player, and it's only going to go up.
So: How might this all play out? And what should Liverpool do?
Wait, wait, wait
The other day, my partner asked me about how players and teams negotiate with the Public Investment Fund-backed clubs. I said something to the effect of, "You keep saying 'more' until they say the right number."
Money as we all understand it -- and as most European soccer clubs do, too -- doesn't exist for the Saudi Pro League. We're all, in a way, trying to figure out how to get the most out of whatever money we have: you, me, Bayern Munich and Brentford.
For the Saudi league, money is almost literally all they have to offer. The league is terrible. There's no history. No one cares about the games. None of these players are joining this league because they're excited by the project, they want to grow the game or they're really into learning at the feet of Nuno Espirito Santo. It's almost all about the money, which isn't to say that the same doesn't frequently hold true in European soccer.
Players who join, say, Real Madrid, often talk about how the history or mentality are what drove them to sign at the Santiago Bernabeu, but here's the other thing that drives them: Real Madrid pay higher wages than any European club outside of Paris. Except, in Europe, you're at least somewhat making a decision about your future when you decide who you sign with.
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Joining Manchester United over Liverpool says something about you. The same goes for whether -- at least in the past -- you joined Real Madrid or Barcelona. Money limits the number of teams who can sign someone, but then a bunch of other factors (personal relationships, club stability, style of play, the manager, tax laws, how aggressively those tax laws are enforced, the weather) also go into the final decision when it comes to whichever rich team the player signs for.
So when players are now choosing between staying in Europe and going to Saudi Arabia, it's almost purely a decision between wanting to compete at the highest level of the thing they do for a living and getting paid way more to no longer compete at anywhere near the highest level of the thing they do for a living. There are also lots of moral questions -- followed quickly by cultural ones -- but I'm not sure how many players are even interfacing with the former when they go through this process.
Mark Ogden says Liverpool rejected £150 million for Mohamed Salah from Al Ittihad but it's "unlikely" they will be able to keep their Egyptian star in the next transfer windows.
The only material leverage that the PIF has in these negotiations is its money. And when you're negotiating with someone like that? Well, you just keep saying "no" until they offer you something that makes you think about saying "yes."
And then just ... keep waiting?
The unfortunate reality of the business of soccer -- the way that players do change teams -- is that when you have a veteran star, the incentives of the team, the fans and the players often don't align.
Salah legitimately might just be the greatest Liverpool player ever. He's certainly the best winger in the history of the Premier League, and he's just always there. Since joining the club in 2017, he's featured in 89% of all the Premier League minutes. Attackers just don't do that.
Here's where I note that I have all kinds of fancy numbers that can describe Salah's impact. Michael Imburgio's DAVIES model essentially sums up all of the on-ball actions into one number -- expected goals added compared to the average at a player's role -- to give you a sense of what all that goal scoring, passing, dribbling, receiving and defending is worth.
Per the model, which has data back through 2017, Salah has produced four of the five best Premier League seasons and five of the top seven:
1. Salah, 2017-18: 11.2 xG added
2. Harry Kane, 17-18: 10.64
3. Salah, 18-19: 10.45
4. Salah, 22-23: 10.39
5. Salah, 21-22: 10.38
6. Erling Haaland, 22-23: 9.39
7. Salah, 19-20: 9.18
Put another way, by this metric, Salah has been the most productive player in the league in five of his six Premier League seasons. And in the one he wasn't (20-2021), he was still only second (8.36 xG added) to Kane (8.59). Since joining Liverpool, he's never had a down year.
But you don't need complicated value-deriving algorithms to understand how important Salah has been to the lights out version of Liverpool we've seen for most of the past half-decade. Put much more simply, by Liverpool fan and writer Andrew Beasley:
I was just thinking about what it would mean IF Liverpool sold Salah, and, well.... pic.twitter.com/E4d6RKEvos
— Andrew Beasley (@BassTunedToRed) September 1, 2023
As some of the more complicated numbers above suggest, Salah -- at 31 -- still hasn't slowed down all that much. And even a slowed-down version of last year's Salah would still easily be one of the best players in the league. So, for Liverpool, right now, it becomes a strange question of, well, how important is it to have one of the best players in the league this season?
If Liverpool think they have a legitimate shot at winning the Premier League, it would be malpractice to let go of your best player unless he really wants to leave. (And all reporting seems to suggest that he's not pushing for a move, but would be open to it if Liverpool accepted the bid. He's currently making around £350,000 per week, the highest salary ever earned by a Liverpool player. At Al Ittihad, the current offer would land him at £1.5 million ... per week.)
Yes, these teams are businesses, but they're businesses because, well, because they're also not businesses. People shape their lives around rooting for Liverpool; for a lot of people, it's a big part of who they are. And much of this connection gets derived from thinking they're watching a team try to win games and trophies. That connection is then what allows Liverpool to make as much money as they do.
Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp urges UEFA to "protect" the game as European leagues are "vulnerable" facing the financial power of the Saudi Pro League.
Liverpool have plenty of money -- see the $140m (£111m) offer for Moisés Caicedo -- and sacrificing a title challenge to ensure they made an extra £200m wouldn't be savvy long-term thinking in my mind. It'd be an encapsulation of everything wrong with the way this game -- and perhaps the world at large, but we don't need to get into that -- works now. If you're not trying to win, then what are we even doing here? The balance sheet will be fine.
The question, of course, is do Liverpool actually have a legit title shot this season? Per the Sporting Index betting market, they're neck-and-neck with Arsenal as the second-best team in the league: projected for 77 points, with Arsenal on 78. They're well clear of fourth-place Manchester United (69 points), but also well behind first place City (88 points). The Stats Perform projection model rates Liverpool as the No. 2 team in England, and still only gives Liverpool a 5% chance of winning the league.
What would Liverpool be without him?
These models and projections should be accompanied by uncertainty warnings at this point in the season. Last year at this time, Liverpool still had a 21% chance of winning the league and an 82% possibility of finishing top four, per FiveThirtyEight's now-defunct prediction model. None of the ultimately relegated teams had a more than 19% shot at going down, while neither Newcastle nor Manchester United had a greater than 16% chance of finishing top four. Soccer is random and we still don't know very much about these teams at this point in the season. So much is still up in the air.
That seems particularly true for Liverpool. They were great for 30 minutes against Chelsea, then couldn't keep the ball and coughed up a bunch of chances from set pieces. Against Bournemouth, they played down a man for nearly half the game. Against Newcastle, they played down a man for more than an hour. Not until Sunday's match against Aston Villa did they have a normal-ish match. They were fantastic, totally dominating against a theoretically tricky opponent despite missing their top two center backs and not playing with a defensive midfielder.
Where things stand right now, it seems likely that Liverpool will qualify for the Champions League -- both because City are the only team in the league who seem clearly better than them, and because it's likely that the Premier League actually gets five spots next season. (They had a completely disastrous season last year and still only slipped down to fifth.)
Losing Salah now would make that trickier, of course. They'd be unable to replace him until January at the earliest, and if we just use some simple back-of-the-napkin math, losing those 10-ish goals that Salah might be worth would drop them down to about even with United, rather than in the fight for second.
However, Liverpool wouldn't be replacing Salah with an average player. On Sunday, Diogo Jota, Cody Gakpo and Harvey Elliott all came off the bench. All three of them have been starters for Liverpool during periods of elite-level performance. Dominik Szoboszlai could also play minutes on the right. The team has a ton of depth along the forward line and in that "tweener, midfielder-attacker" space. Although Salah has scored or assisted in Liverpool's last 10 matches, I think the hit from his departure would be closer to four or five points, which would still likely see them comfortably qualify for the Champions League.
Could they set their sets higher than that, though? We won't know much better for at least a couple of months. Maybe these new midfielders coalesce and provide some stability, Darwin Núñez gets a run of games and starts to put it all together, Erling Haaland gets hurt and come January, Liverpool have a legit shot at the title. So why not wait until then?
The PIF's approach for Salah isn't part of some well thought-out plan. If they made a $200m bid for Salah at the beginning of the summer and he told Liverpool he wanted to leave, Salah would be playing in the Saudi league right now. Liverpool would've signed -- I don't know -- Rafael Leão to replace him, they would've spent big money on some star midfielder, or both. Instead, the bid didn't come in until it was way too late for Liverpool to line anything up.
With Mohamed Salah's being linked to Al Ittihad, Don Hutchison answers the question if Salah can be replaced.
Could the bid go away forever if Liverpool didn't accept whatever the final offer ends up being this week? Sure, but that seems unlikely. No soccer player currently in Europe can provide $200m of on-field performance, especially not one in his 30s who also has plenty of super-talented teammates.
Were Salah to move on, reinvesting that $200m-plus would almost definitely make the team better, as a whole, in the long run. Plus, the team is now mostly built out of players in the 20-to-26 age range. Salah doesn't fit the same timeline as the rest of the squad, but the new arrivals almost certainly would.
As sad or as icky as it might feel to contemplate all of this, there is a competitive argument for Liverpool to move on from one of their best-ever and most-beloved players. But there's not really a great one for doing it now.
Just like they did when Barcelona wanted Philippe Coutinho in the summer of 2017, Liverpool might be able to get even more money in January from the PIF while also spending the next few months lining up an immediate replacement. And if they happen to be in title contention come the next window, then they can figure out whether they can stomach making the move. Salah, himself, also might not want to move if another Premier League trophy seems like it's on the cards.
After all, there will always be next summer. And the longer you wait, the more times you get to say "no."