Mo Salah was already sprinting toward Premier League history when, in late November, he spoke. For just the third time in his Liverpool career, he sought out journalists in a blustery mixed zone. He was “disappointed,” he said, and “probably more out than in,” because, with his contract expiring at season’s end, he hadn’t “received any offers yet to stay in the club.”
And with that, speculation veered toward controversy. Salah’s pointed words turned private talks into a public saga. With banner-wielding fans roaring him on, the Egyptian winger has repeatedly heaped pressure onto Liverpool executives. He has insisted that he and the club are “far away” from an agreement to keep him at Anfield beyond June.
“There is no progress there,” he said last month.
All the while, though, he has been making stronger statements with his feet.
The “contract year,” in which players prove their worth ahead of free agency, is a well-known phenomenon in American sports. Salah, week after week, has been taking it to new, astronomical heights.
Salah scored his 23rd goal of the Premier League season Sunday in a 2-1 win over Wolves. He has powered Liverpool to the top of the table, seven points clear of second-place Arsenal. With an EPL-leading 14 assists as well, he is on pace to smash the league’s single-season record for goal contributions. He is the primary reason Liverpool is favored to win both the Prem and the Champions League this spring.
And so, he has stated a fairly irresistible case for a hefty new contract.
Why the Mo Salah contract saga came to this
The sources of Liverpool’s hesitation, presumably, have been Salah’s salary demands and his age. He’ll turn 33 in June, and inch ever further past the point at which most soccer players decline.
Liverpool knows this, and in fact, it has reclaimed its place atop the sport in part because it has resisted rewarding post-prime players for past success. In 2021, it allowed 30-year-old Georginio Wijnaldum to leave for PSG; in 2022, rather than offer a lucrative extension, it sold 30-year-old Sadio Mané to Bayern Munich. In 2023, it sold 29-year-old Fabinho and 33-year-old Jordan Henderson to Saudi Arabia, and allowed 31-year-old Roberto Firmino to leave as well. All had won trophies at Liverpool; but the club accurately anticipated their ebbs, and realized that, to return to the summit, it had to move on and reload.
In 2024, there were hints that Salah might be heading in a similar direction. After injuring his hamstring at last winter’s Africa Cup of Nations, he seemed to slow. From March through the end of last season, excluding a Europa League stomping of Sparta Prague, he tallied only five goals and one assist in 14 games (10 starts).
So, at 32 years old and as the club’s highest-earner, Liverpool seemed justifiably content to let Salah’s contract enter its final year.
Salah responded with perhaps the most prolific six months of a prolific career.
Salah’s historic 2024-25 season
Galloping up and down the Liverpool right, into defenders’ nightmares, he has scored or created 47 goals in all competitions. It’s already his second-best single-season tally — and 2024-25 is only two-thirds complete. His 1.4 goal contributions per 90 minutes are even better than his age-25 breakout season at Liverpool. After six years of very good, legend-burnishing production, he is suddenly having a Ballon d’Or-caliber campaign — just when some began to suspect he was drifting in the opposite direction.
And his numbers, although juiced by penalties, seem anything but fluky.
Beneath the headliners, per FBref.com, Salah has completed more passes into the penalty area than any other Premier League player; and carried the ball into the penalty area 86 times through 24 matches, 20 more times than any EPL peer.
He has also received by far the most progressive passes in the league — a reflection of his role in a humming Liverpool team, but also of his savvy movement and still-elite athleticism. In early phases of play, he stays high and wide, and constantly threatens opponents with vertical runs. In the final third, he often drifts inside, latches onto all sorts of balls, and finishes with a variety of techniques, with both feet. The diversity of his goals has been delightful.
Salah, over the past four seasons, has also become one of global soccer’s very best final-third passers. That devastating combo has him on pace to break Erling Haaland’s and Thierry Henry’s jointly held record of 44 goals-plus-assists in a 38-game Premier League season. His 37 this year, so far, are 15 ahead of his closest challenger (Newcastle’s Alexander Isak has 22; Haaland has 21).
His goals also helped lift Liverpool to the top seed in the Champions League. They’re responsible for dozens of Premier League points. Salah has scored or assisted in 26 of the 32 games he’s played in those two competitions. He has done it again and again, climbing in record books and making different types of history with each feat.
And he has sustained it so deep into the season — he’s scored in each of his last six games — that Liverpool, at this stage, surely can’t afford to let him walk in the summer.
Where Salah and Liverpool go from here
Salah’s success has, of course, doubled as a problem because every goal raises his price tag — or validates his agent’s demands.
We don’t know precisely what those demands are. But he and his agent, Ramy Abbas, are surely asking for a salary well beyond the roughly $23 million he currently earns. And they probably want a three- or four-year deal — which would make Salah one of soccer’s highest-paid players through his 37th birthday.
For Liverpool, such a deal would be difficult to digest. Most sports scientists and Moneyballers would probably advise against it. In all likelihood, Salah will decline over the coming years. After all, nearly every player, even great ones — including the two greatest of all time, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — has indeed declined in their mid-30s.
But if this, Salah’s 2024-25 season, is the ridiculously high baseline, a ridiculously lucrative contract might just be palatable.
And Salah — who has stayed in pristine physical shape, and mostly avoided major injuries, throughout his career — might just be an extreme outlier.
The only certainty, for now, is that the lucrative new contract will be necessary. After previous reported interest from PSG and the Spanish superclubs, Saudi Arabia’s Al Hilal is publicly circling. There is natural suspicion that Salah’s camp is drumming up that interest to squeeze more money out of Liverpool; and that he doesn’t actually have any desire to leave. But Liverpool can’t know that; executives can only listen to the chatter. “I think he is close to leaving,” Salah’s friend and former Liverpool teammate Dejan Lovren recently said.
All Liverpool can know is that Salah, in propelling the club toward what would be its second EPL title, has made himself indispensable.
