After several weeks of stopping and starting, Mohamed Salah is at long last officially a Liverpool player. Moments ago, the two clubs published their respective hellos and goodbyes to the 25-year-old Egyptian winger, bringing a close to a record breaking transaction and leaving Roma in search of a new foil for Edin Dzeko
Salah doesn’t look terribly happy for a man who just singlehandedly broke two transfer records. With an initial payment of €42 million plus a potential for €8 million in bonuses, Salah is simultaneously Roma’s most lucrative sale and Liverpool’s costliest purchase ever.
And while Roma has a gigantic hill to climb to replace Salah’s production, not to mention social media presence, full marks to Monchi for potentially getting is initial €50 million valuation. After lodging an initial bid believed to be in the neighborhood of €32 million, the two clubs traded figures for several weeks, with reports emerging as recently as yesterday indicating they’d settled on a €39 million plus bonuses deal. The lesson, as always, don’t read too much into transfer figures until you hear directly from the source.
Salah was quite to take to Twitter to share his appreciation for his time in Rome:
It’s always hard to tell the real impetus behind these moves—did Salah push for it, was it a club directive, etc—but at least Salah was kind enough to express his gratitude for this days in Rome, which were undoubtedly the best of his career thus far.
I have no idea how he’ll fare in Liverpool because I find the EPL detestable, but we’ll be sure to check in on Salah from time to time. And again, it is unfortunate that the bulk of these funds are merely going to the balance books, but until Roma can sustain life in Europe, I’m afraid this is our lot in life.
So, now we wait and watch. To whom will Roma turn for help, Domenico Berardi? Alejandro Gomez? Some random South American?
