Well, that’s good then. Things fall apart. But sometime they also don’t. And the centre does actually hold.
Perhaps the most interesting part of Mohamed Salah’s contract extension at Liverpool is the fact this is a rare crossover story, a signing that steps outside its own tribal margins. There will of course be localised delight. Liverpool fans can look forward to their own lost weekend in the sun, a sense that the good times will now continue to roll, that the time bar has shifted. Return to your seats. This is a lock-in.
More widely, Salah staying is a shot of adrenaline for the Premier League, which is sold on fat, wet personality driven storylines, a star factory that does sometimes have to scrape the walls for actual stars. The commercial logic is obvious. Salah is the league’s best player. Salah is the most famous African footballer. Salah is the biggest sporting star in the Muslim world.
Salah is also a one-man blue-chip brand, instantly recognisable, the beaming, scurrying cartoon squirrel of elite football, his cut-through benevolent and broad. Never mind Liverpool’s global fanbase. Richard Masters will have been doing the running man in his underpants on Friday morning. This is like Disney re-signing Mickey Mouse.
Given the widely trailed nature of the deal it will be necessary now to have takes about the takes, to identify wider points of jeopardy. With this in mind it perhaps won’t be long before some contrarian suggests that if Liverpool’s owners really are the hedge fund sharks of the popular imagination, all vampire teeth, faces thin and glossed as the corporate credit card, they will put Salah up for sale.
Seriously. Sell him to Paris Saint-Germain for £90m this summer. This would be the economically rational decision. Instant gain for the cost of a little ink and some printed sheets. Corporate policy retained. Duty to shareholders observed. Nothing personal kids. It’s always, always business.
This would also be entirely wrong, of course, and for reasons that go beyond armed insurrection in L4. The fact is Liverpool’s executive had no choice. Losing Salah for nothing would have been sackable corporate incompetence. Here is your data outlier, a player with 32 goals and 22 assists this season. Here is your chief branding item, the most followed Premier League player on social media by an absolute mile, a one-man bonus streaming rights deal.
Plus there is a kind of institutional debt here. Salah’s presence over the past eight seasons has defined not just an era of success, the lifting of an emotional cloud, but the owners’ wondrous returns on their financial investment. There is an argument it would make commercial and cultural sense for FSG to pay Salah just to sit in the stands for the next two years, put him on gardening leave, pay him to wave on posters.
So yes, there is no downside on the face of it. Except, this is football, and there must always be variables, lurking doom, potential collapse, all of which are key to the game’s strangely inelastic appeal. The fact is, this is not entirely a free ride. It comes with challenges, not least for Arne Slot.
Signing Salah doesn’t change one key point. With or without him, next season still has to be the start of a rebuild. There was a tendency during the first half of the season, as Slot’s team played with a kind of light around them, to dismiss Jürgen Klopp as a kind of woad-smeared energy guy, to see Slot sifting successfully through the parts, finally bringing order to this first draft of history.
By now it seems clear the current title-bound season is also a hybrid triumph. Slot has overseen the first fix with remarkable skill. But he will now have to effect a more profound building job. For the first time there will be a slight sense of pressure around Salah too.
The football has very clearly not left him, is still clinging to his collar, giddy on the ride. Salah isn’t even very old. It might seem as though he has been around for ever, 10 years since he was skittering down the Chelsea right, peak malevolent José Mourinho up there taking bites on his touchline, but Salah is 32, not 35.
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Luka Modric won the Ballon d’Or at 33. Robert Lewandowski, who like Salah treats his body like a nutritional experiment, who also looks like a renaissance anatomical drawing with his shirt off, is leading a brilliant young Barcelona team at 36 years old. It is only seven weeks since Salah led the controlled dismantling of Manchester City at the Etihad, a peak moment during that period where he seemed to be running through thinner air than everyone else.
Since then Liverpool have looked a little tired and post-adrenal. Salah’s form – we can talk about this now – has been poor. In seven games since the Etihad he has had three shots on target. He has scored one league goal from open play at Anfield since Boxing Day. He has basically been a shadow since the home leg against PSG.
The Roy Keane theory of Big-Men-For-Big-Stuff would see this as shrinking in the face of destiny. But it would also be wrong to suggest Liverpool have dipped because Salah has dipped, rather than the other way round or, as ever, a bit of both. Teams are more complex than this. Slot has always seemed more interested in Salah’s defensive work, which has been good this season, and speaks more clearly to his ability to fit an evolving shape.
But Slot also knows Salah-dependence in attack has been the story of the season up to a point, which is fine as long as it works. This has to change, and with a little less in the way of revolution now.
Slot also knows he owes Salah. The manager has been rightly praised for his tinkering, his command of small details. But it is clearly a bonus on this front when you also happen to have a ruthless goal maniac up front justifying every choice by kicking the ball into the net. The more I walk around the place with my finger on the trigger of this AK-47 the more people keep calling me a genius and laughing at all my jokes.
From here Slot still needs not only a post-Salah plan but a current one too. Salah’s departure would have been a disaster. But it would at least have offered something closer to scorched earth, a refresh from ground zero. No doubt some will point out PSG got shot of Kylian Mbappé two years too late. Salah barely registers on the Mbappé Scale of mega-divas, but he does have an ego, does say stuff in the mixed zone when it suits him, does look cross when he gets subbed off. This will require managing.Salah is also the one player in the league who has basically just given for the last eight seasons, offering up only relentless value for money. He deserves this two-year run into whatever version of the future Slot can build around him. All logic suggests that job just got a little easier. But it will come with challenges too. Caveat re-emptor. The rebuild still starts here.
Source: theguardian.com
