As Mo Salah’s contract sage rumbles on, Liverpool fans are being served up a big bowl of football money problems…
WHAT a night at Anfield.
Seeing Real Madrid’s sense of self-grandiose go unacknowledged throughout the evening felt emblematic of so much.
As I absorbed the moment from The Kop, I looked down at the latest Mohamed Salah banner feeling a knot of discomfort as I scanned the end rhyme demanding that FSG ‘give Mo his dough’.
Let me be clear, I deplore the money and all it brings.
I can’t stand that they, all of them from players to owners and everyone feeding off the carcass, have so much of it.
What drives me to insanity is that we, the collective we of supporters, want to pay them more of it.
We (the collective) have created our own digital currency in football. Like many of them, it doesn’t actually exist. We use digital sums to leverage arguments and trade commodities.
The reality is that paying Mohamed Salah, a real person demanding real money, you’re going to be locked in complex negotiation for a long time.
We’d hoped that impasse might have broken given Arne Slot’s press conference being held unusually on a Thursday. As it stands, Salah, Virgil van Dijk and Trent Alexander-Arnold remain Liverpool’s greatest question mark.
I recently wrote about Liverpool letting Trent go on a free as a PR disaster and urged them to throw the kitchen sink at keeping him. I want all three to stay.
I still find the money grotesque.
Perhaps the players are most absolved from blame. They sacrifice every day: their privacy, their bodies, their youth. I get that.
It doesn’t stop me looking around Anfield on a match day – a community I grew up in and in which my Grandma still lives – and wonder what a quarter of Liverpool’s highest-earning wages could do for that place, those families, these supporters.
I’ve always wanted Boston to give more of a shit about L4.
Football’s devouring of itself continues. We are turkeys voting for Christmas. The more clamour to give an in-form player whatever they want financially will do nothing to halt another Manchester City situation in future.
So what, right? It’s about Liverpool being competitive. About having the best and that doesn’t come cheap, right?
Right.
This weekend, fans of both Liverpool and Manchester clubs will protest against ticket price increases at both respective games.
All four clubs, even Everton, have the advantage of knowing demand remains outweighing supply. Liverpool can fill my seat 10 times over, so why would they be arsed fixing their ticketing system or website inefficiencies?
We can say that this has nothing to do with contracts and to a degree, yes. Gargantuan TV deals alone argue against a necessity in increased ticket pricing, the morally questionable sponsorships or the next house to become derelict in the shadow of the behemoth Anfield structure.
The problem remains that any stakeholder of any level advocating for more money in football means we are all guilty by association. I’m the Carmela to your Tony. Go to church all you like, it won’t rid you.
We swallow the ticket price increases as long as a billionaire consortium rescues the club, or another agent and player secure half a million pounds a week.
So, if I accept my own hypocrisy and accept I’m more in than out. That it’s ‘not my money’ and that I’ve condemned myself to an eternity of football hell in the afterlife for my sin (what does that look like? Probably following Chelsea home and away), a question persists…
What happens next, with Salah, with supporters, with football?
How much should we enjoy this week of weeks when the world’s eyes are trained on Anfield.
Liverpool are top of all the leagues which feels truly priceless.
I need to not worry, I know. It’s currently so wonderful. Once again they’ve got me there.
Hopefully I’ll get to watch Mohamed Salah again in the flesh this weekend. I would love him to stay and carry Liverpool to another title he arguably deserves most.
I can’t get on board with your ‘just give him what he wants’, sorry. As you know, I hate everything about the money.
But I love football and the footballers. What to do in this moral quandary, however it all decides itself, I will probably end up a bit worse off while rich people will become significantly richer.
I’ve made my own deal, an eternity of condemnation in The Shed End awaits.
Focus on City this Sunday. I’ll be there. Imagine we win and go 11 clear.
Nothing else could possibly matter.
Right?
Buy Dan Morgan’s book ‘Jürgen Said To Me’ on Klopp, Liverpool and the remaking of a city…
