Mohamed Salah’s contract psychodrama has defined Liverpool’s season so far almost as much as their exceptional form on the pitch, with FSG yet to bow to the Egyptian king’s demands.
But where previously there had been a total impasse between the player and the owners, there appears to have been at least some movement in recent days.
Some reports have suggested that Salah is now leaning more towards signing a new Liverpool deal.
But we are now less than two weeks out from the juncture after which he will be able to sign pre-contract terms overseas and the situation is evolving every day.
Salah has been mesmeric in 2024-25. He has more goal involvements than any other player in Europe’s so-called ‘Big Five’ leagues.
But Fenway Sports Group (FSG) have left it until the eleventh hour to make a formal proposal to the attacker, who is one goal away from overtaking Billy Liddell as Liverpool’s fourth all-time top scorer.
Most ownership groups would write Salah a blank cheque – but FSG, the Boston-based sports and media investment firm who have owned Liverpool since 2010, are not most owners.
John Henry, Tom Werner, Billy Hogan, Michael Gordon and their peers in the FSG boardroom are all about value. Acquiring it, maximising it, retaining it.
Despite what most Liverpool supporters see as a cataclysmic misstep in not tying Salah down, it is hard to argue that the owners don’t recognise value.
FSG paid £300m for Liverpool over a decade ago. If they cashed in tomorrow, they would get – at the very, very least – 10 times that.
Liverpool University football finance lecturer Kieran Maguire has described that to TBR Football as the “bargain of the century” on more than one occasion.
Without being privy to the intricacies of the Merseysiders’ negotiations with Salah, it’s impossible to know Salah’s demands and gauge how they stack up against FSG’s value index.
However, Salah’s agent has given a rare peak behind the curtain into exactly how much the 32-year-old earns from his Liverpool contract, as well as his other financial interests.
Ramy Abbas Issa has revealed how much Mohamed Salah earns
Salah’s representative, Rammy Abbas Issa, is perhaps the most outspoken agent in football.
He is known for his forthright communication style, which he has historically exhibited on Twitter, or X.
Abbas, who is somewhat unusual as an agent in that he represents Salah and no one else, brokered the attacker’s last contract, which he inked in July 2022.
The headlines at that time relayed that he would be earning £350,000 per week, but the reality is rarely as simple as the headlines suggest.
There are image rights, base and variable pay, signing on fees, loyalty bonuses and intermediary fees among dozens of other considerations to factor in.
Fortunately, in Salah’s case, there is perhaps the most detailed case study into an individual set of contract negotiations in the history of football available.
In October 2023, both Salah and Abbas gave their personal insight for a Harvard Business School review of the talks between the player and the club.
In those, it was revealed that Salah expects earns close to £1m per month from his Liverpool contract, his business interests, and his personal brand endorsements.
As quoted by The Guardian, one direct quote Abbas provided during the negotiations read as follows: “If we find a way to get Liverpool to agree to the salary we have in mind and if Mohamed performs at a 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 and €62m per year.”
If he gets a new deal and even the most modest of pay rises before his contract expires, that means Salah can expect to continue more than £1m per week for the duration of his new deal.
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