Agent for Liverpool star Mohamed Salah reportedly said his client now makes over £1 million each week.
Salah, 31, ended months of speculation by signing a three-year contract in the summer of 2022. However, it wasn’t easy to work out a compromise.
Speculation over Salah’s future at Anfield has been high due to the interest of rival teams in acquiring his services. Salah openly said that he wanted to remain at the club, but the lengthy negotiations and series of failures just added fuel to the fire.
Somewhere around £350k per week was agreed upon as a compromise that satisfied everyone involved. New insights into the tale have been provided, however, by Rammy Abbas, Salah’s counselor.
Salah’s lengthy contract discussions with Liverpool have been the subject of a Harvard Business School case study to which both Abbas and the player have contributed. The research, a copy of which was provided to The Guardian, provides significant insight into how close Salah came to leaving Anfield.
Abbas and Salah both consented to be cited as if they were speaking at the time of the discussions, thus there was some confusion when Abbas said negotiations had “broken down entirely” weeks before a breakthrough was established.
He also made it quite obvious that the discussions were deadlocked over certain serious issues. The words “We are still very far apart” were spoken by him shortly before he presented Liverpool with a decisive counteroffer. It’s not just a 5% gap between what we’re asking for and what they’re ready to provide that has Mohamed considering throwing in the towel on his contract.
If Liverpool gave in to Salah’s demands, the player’s agent said, his client would earn more than £1 million a week. Although the value of Salah’s new contract is not specified in the research, he is widely believed to be the best paid player at Liverpool, and it is assumed that the club gave in to Abbas’ demands.
It was also discussed how Salah’s transformation since joining Liverpool in 2015 has resulted in major sponsorship deals with companies like Adidas, Pepsi, and Gucci.
Abbas continued, “If we find a way to get Liverpool to agree to the salary we have in mind, and if Mohamed performs at the level he has achieved in the past seasons, we conservatively expect the total amount received by Mohamed and the image rights companies over the next few years from both his playing contract and his image rights contracts to be somewhere between €54m [£46.8m] and €62m [£53.7m] per year.”
Despite Salah’s commitment to Liverpool until the summer of 2025, he has received attention from other clubs. Liverpool turned down a massive offer from Al-Ittihad, worth £150 million, for the striker during the summer transfer window.
The Saudi Pro League club is set to renew their interest in the Egypt international in the coming months, however it remains to be seen whether Liverpool or Salah have the stomach to enable what would be a historic transaction.