With Mo Salah’s contract frustrations rumbling on and the Liverpool unrest around it growing, should FSG’s approach be questioned yet again?
PLAYERS’ contract negotiations have always worried me.
Michael Owen is responsible for much of this. In the latter days of the 2003-4 season, he swore to anyone and everyone that everything was sorted and he’d be signing a new contract once he’d finished off his hoovering or something. However, as the weeks passed and Madrid began to flutter their eyelashes in a sordid leer, it was obvious what was going to happen.
A paltry £8m and Tony Nunez.
But that’s only from the player’s side. It’s even more concerning when the club makes out they’ll get right onto tying up that megastar deal once they’ve taken out the bins.
Last week, Mo Salah told the press that he had stated his terms, that they weren’t ‘crazy’ and that he wanted to play for Liverpool. It’s rare to hear such candid talk from a player locked in negotiations but being in Cameroon rather than Kirkby probably helped loosen his tongue. The main thing is that he wants to stay and the ball is firmly in Liverpool’s court.
So deal with it, Liverpool. Deal with it quickly. Why aren’t you dealing with it now?
Club officials and football administrators would argue that it’s not as easy as that. There are numerous factors in play. Mo Salah celebrates his 30th birthday in June and this is probably his last contract at this level.
His terms may not be ‘crazy’ for him but maybe they are to the owners. Maybe they could save a bundle on selling him on for 180 million and then use the cash to build a new, even better Mo Salah for sod all.
And it’s this which irritates me most about our owners and with business people in general, when they lower their muddy hands into the hearts and mental health of the fans. The idea that you can dismiss one footballing genius and readily create another.
Mo Salah is the best footballer in the world. He just is. Show me other candidates and I’ll show you my back. I’m not listening. Sorry.
Only one club in the world can have the best player in the world and when that’s us, we do all we can to maintain that situation. Keep your 180m and your Diet Mo. You look after Mo Salah and pay the going rate for him. All other factors are irrelevant if you want Liverpool to have the best players. If you can afford him, you pay it.
And they can afford it. Liverpool are a cash cow and, though they’ll never have enough money to make them truly happy — what firm of venture capitalists can — they can afford Mo Salah. No, I don’t have their end of year accounts to hand to prove that, but I can think we can agree they’ve hardly spent like drunken sailors on players for us of late.
There’s a danger in failing to add to the squad. Let’s go back to February 1970, when The Reds faced Second Division Watford at Vicarage Road. Our lineup contained the greats from the ‘70s, with Ian St John, Ron Yeats and Tommy Lawrence forming the spine of the team. We were favourites to go through on reputation, but we went down to a humiliating 1-0 defeat thanks to a Barry Endean goal.
Sidenote: I’ve just learned that Mike Walker was in goal that day. According to a phone-in last night he was the worst Everton manager in recent history until…
Anyway, it was a wake-up call for Bill Shankly. Those lads had just won our first FA Cup five years earlier and are considered heroes to this day, but the great man knew what it meant. The starting 11 was old and needed renewing. Those three players, along with Bobby Graham and Ian Ross who also started that day, were soon sold. The new Liverpool saw places for Steve Heighway, Kevin Keegan and John Toshack. The great side of the 1960s slowly morphed into the greater side of the ‘70s.
Eight of the starting 11 for the final in Kyiv against Madrid nearly four years ago are still Liverpool regulars. Only Lovren and Gini have moved on and Karius is… Well… Karius. This Liverpool are getting older together and, though continuity can be a good thing, there’ll be a day when we suddenly need six new signings for the opening fixture of the season. That doesn’t always work. See August 2011.
That said, Sadio Mane, Roberto Firmino and Mo Salah are still in their prime. One of the pleasing things about yesterday’s win was that the three goal scorers were not regulars in that department, but it was nice to have them help out when two of the three big lads are away. Maybe Diogo is a long-term replacement for Firmino, but it’s hard to see how you swap Sadio and Mo for equal talent. And only equal talent is good enough.
Oliver Kay wrote in The Athletic last week, “All three forwards have less than 18 months remaining on their contract. For a club whose strategic planning over recent years has been exemplary, it is a curious situation and a growing concern.”
The worry is that they still have their Moneyball tendencies and it’s where they have to answer a difficult question — namely, do you want Liverpool to be a top European side crammed with elite stars, or is your strategy to buy Roma’s Mo Salah for £36m and sell him as Liverpool’s Mo Salah for five times that amount. I don’t like my feelings on what their answers might be.
Of course, they want the glory of trophies as that comes with the financial success they crave, but it does worry me that the 10th greatest goal scorer in our history is currently sitting in West-Central Africa looking at his phone with increasing bemusement.
FSG have to decide what they want to be. Has the Jurgen Klopp success come as a fortuitous accident, or was this the dream all along? Have they accepted that they’ll never match Manchester City and Chelsea’s spending power and settled for a very wealthy third place behind them, or do they want to make a statement of intent?
This is the time for letting us know. And Mo Salah. Use him or lose him.
Use him.
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You’ve probably heard this name already from every American who reads TAW, but… Mookie Betts. Another generational talent FSG chose to sell on (trade, actually) rather than properly compensate. He went on to win the MLB title with his new team, while FSG’s Red Sox looked on.
I hope the Betts fiasco served as a wakeup call and they’ll make things work with Mo. Losing him would be unacceptable, no matter how many trophies FSG have helped the club win.
Bang on. With any other player you *might* think about cashing in, eg coutinho. But he was never the best in the world; Mo is. And it’s pretty clear he isn’t suddenly going to start eating ice cream for breakfast, so he’ll still be great in three or four years. Replacing him? Where do you start. How do you start? It’s a non-starter. Come on FSG, just sort it.
I’ve been waiting for an article questioning FSG and their motives for a while.
Well done TAW.
Mo Salah must be kept and offered a new contract.
For me, FSG want to own a club, with guaranteed huge revenues streams, with minimal investment (the super-league was and is what they crave).
That’s why there is minimal squad investment.
If Salah leaves / sold – then serious further questions must be asked of FSG
Great article. Its high time we start questioning the club about the long term plans for this team and manager. There is too much uncertainities and minimum investment in refreshing the squad. PL is so competitive that a few wrong decisions this summer can make us a top 4 chasing team rather than the title.
You mean like Lionel Messi long after he started melting and making ridiculous demands
No – he might be the best in the world at this moment (and thats a big if) – but you dont ruin your club for one player no matter how great they are
Barcelona did
Look at them now
Pay. The Man. His Money.
His demands are nowhere in the Messi area of demands. Think about what a replacement at the same level would cost in terms of transfer fee and wages. FSG appear to have barbed wire in their poc,kets. Sadly a refresh is needed in mf ,as well as sorting out Mo and Sadio but I dont thing FSG are even considering it.
To Ricardo C – Mookie Betts wasn’t traded or sold on. He was a free agent so Boston had no claim over him. The Dodgers offered him $360million for 10 years. Mookie wanted the most money he could get and took it from the second richest club in MLB.
Kudos to the comment by Ricardo re: FSG and how they manage the Red Sox.
Old habits die hard and there are nuggets of serious concern if you follow FSG’s bizarre 20 year ownership of the Red Sox as a precursor to their role at Liverpool.
Yes, baseball and football (soccer) are two very different sports, but their financial structures do share a few similarities.
It is true that the Red Sox won several championships, but also had bloated payrolls that nonetheless resulted in horrendous seasons, i.e., last in the division, plus incredulous decisions about supreme talent, e.g., Mookie Betts.
Moreover, the absolute shameless way FSG ran a beloved manager out of town (Terry Francona) who won two championships (one of which after an 86 year (!) title drought) should give everybody pause about how they handle Jurgen Klopp, who like Francona galvanized a fan base and delivered trophies. I am being quite serious here; FSG was ruthless and morally corrupt in how it dealt with Francona.
This is not to say FSG should be viewed entirely with doom and gloom. FSG have put Liverpool in a decent position to win, built / enhanced our facilities to be world class and of course we have enjoyed some truly sublime moments the past few years created by transcendent talent such as Salah, Van Dijk, Trent, Klopp and others, but …
How FSG manage their business with the Red Sox should give Liverpool fans pause not only with Salah’s contract, but also the overall long-term product at Liverpool.
Old habits die hard and venture capitalists, especially those fixated on Moneyball, have it in their DNA to prioritize (1) the rows and columns of a spreadsheet and the resultant value-add instead of – and at the expense of – the quality of the product, and (2) those numbers to what is really important: what the product means to the fan bases that support the teams like a family member.
Case in point: The Super League debacle.
They need to sign Mo Salah, pronto.
Great article as per, Karlo. I fear that FSG’s business model is to ensure CL each season and to make sure we have a squad that can get a good way in to it. Anything else is a bonus. They’re looking at Mo and thinking they’d love to keep him but ……. their business model matters more. It’s what’s got them to where they are and they aren’t about to chuck it over, even for Mo. He’s of an age where they will offer him a certain level of money. He either accepts it or he doesn’t. They know there’ll be a backlash and their calculation is they can handle it. It is all about bottom line, I fear.
The only difference in motivation between Hicks & Gilette and FSG is H&G were stupid enough to spell it out in public: ‘LFC is a great brand with great earning potential’.
Footbal is a girls game to these people, they don’t give a solitary f*ck about anything but the bottom line. Going back to the one A level economics lesson I remember, the golden ticket is inelastic demand. You can do what you want, they’re still gonna pay for your product. I’m sure we’ve all been to the restaurant with the million dollar view that serves terrible food and makes zero effort! I bet the only reason FSG celebrated the league win is the ‘added value’! They’re good at running a business so not as bad as the glazers and Jurgen was a masterstroke, but you can look at that cynically. They’re doing whats necessary to stay top 4 with minimum outlay, so they looked at the stats for which managers have the best dollars to points ratio. I avoid stats like a city 5-0 on MOTD but I bet Jurgen’s right up there. Sadly, a bit like bumbling boris, I can’t see what would be a genuine all-round improvement if they sold up…