Mo Salah, No Cry
Liverpool are coasting to the Premier League title and Mo Salah is staying, but in a way the club's season has felt weirdly... angst-ridden.
So after all that, Mo Salah is staying at Liverpool for another couple of years. Confirmation that he’s agreed terms with the club over a new contract has been greeted with something approaching relief. It had started to feel like a bit of dead weight on their season, surprising though that may feel to say.
Of course, to an extent the rights and wrongs of him staying at Anfield have been a matter of ifs and buts. Salah has been in sensational form for Liverpool this season. But this has dipped of late. He’s 32 years old. But then perhaps it’s our perception of the relative ages of footballers that needs updating; they seem to last longer, these days, and no-one would doubt that he’s in excellent shape.
He’s not been playing brilliantly of late, but if this continues Saudi Arabia is a decent back-up option (financially speaking, and for those who can stomach the ethics of doing so), and Liverpool could still sell him—likely for an extremely handsome fee indeed—if things weren’t going to plan. Ironically, staying at Liverpool keeps his options open.
And while leaving with a Premier League title would have been satisfying, staying gives him another two goes at the Champions League. Furthermore—and this, I think, is really important—he’s already an extremely wealthy man. He’s not going to be down the food bank soon, so to a point that side of things kinda doesn’t matter.
One of the curiosities of this season is that there hasn’t been a great deal of fever surrounding what seems almost certain to be Liverpool’s second league title in three and a half decades. Sure enough, there’ll be emotional outpourings when it’s mathematically confirmed—there will almost certainly be poetry—but as of the right now it doesn’t feel like they’re celebrating their incoming win quite as much as they should, that there isn’t enough excitement in the air.
Perhaps they’re just being insouciant. Perhaps every time they close their eyes memories of the spring of 2014 are burned to the insides of their eyelids. Or perhaps I just don’t pay enough attention. That’s always a possibility. I am obviously more drawn towards the ongoing soap operas that Manchester United and my own team Tottenham Hotspur offer through repeatedly playing like eleven Sideshow Bobs on a field covered in rakes to have been drawn in by this sort of thing. “Football team are good” just doesn’t hit the same as, “Look! Look! They’re doing the thing again!”
And Liverpool have been good. Like, really, really good. To a point, this is because almost everyone has been beating everyone else below them. Arsenal don’t have a truly reliable goalscorer. That Nottingham Forest are even in third place still feels like a fever dream. Chelsea still look a tiny bit too much like a jigsaw that’s been dropped on the floor (which isn’t to say they’re no good - put those green biros away), and we all know about Manchester City. To a point, Liverpool have had the least wrong with them.
But it could also be about more than this. In the era of the billionaire, maybe winning one trophy makes you a millionaire. Perhaps expectations are subconsciously setting themselves to such absurd levels that winning one of anything almost isn’t enough any more. Perhaps the minimum you have to aspire to these days is a treble or a quadruple. There’s nothing that the broader culture of the 21st century can’t ruin, to some extent or another.
In this respect, their season has already been punctured a little on the pitch. Real Madrid did a number on them in the Champions League, well before they expected anything like this to even be a possibility. The domestic cups brought the two worst types of cup loss; one in the final and to a team that hadn’t previously won one since before either The Beatles or Elvis were big, the other to a team that was bottom of the division below them, and who remain there to this day.
On top of this, the decision of Trent Alexander-Arnold to leave for Real Madrid on a free transfer at the end of this season will have felt like a slight. He was born in the city and has been with the club for 21 years. Some corners of the Liverpool internet have not taken this news well. How much of that is merely performative and how representative the extremes are of the whole are not the point, here. The point is that this all adds to a mood. Rumours that he could yet stay will continue until he’s on the pitch at the Bernabeu in a white Adidas shirt with a stuffed donkey under his arm.
The Salah contract has been resolved in the way that supporters wanted, but it’s been a tense wait. And all that contract business still hasn’t quite concluded yet. No confirmation has been given yet, regarding Virgil Van Dijk. These are essentially the three most important players that Liverpool have had in one team since possibly the late 1980s. That it should have felt angst-ridden probably shouldn’t feel surprising.
If there are any Liverpool supporters reading this and feeling your hands clench into fists… cool your beans. It was really bad luck in a badly designed competition that your team should have been playing Real Madrid as early as you did in the first place. And while losing on penalty kicks isn’t a lottery—that’s a hill I’ll die upon, but a hill for another day—it’s always an unlucky way to lose. We’ve all been there.
You’ve got Salah for another two years. And I’m not quite sure what to say about Trent beyond the simple and obvious perspective that, for a professional footballer and definitely for better for worse, the appeal of going to Real Madrid should be obvious, and if you don’t understand that then you probably don’t understand football. Or the concept of career progression. Yes, it is your team. Yes, he’s one of you. But it’s also his job and his life.
Liverpool have been good this season, really good. Really, really good. You deserve that still commanding lead at the top of the Premier League. That defeat at Fulham was your first away Premier League defeat of the season. The team had previously gone unbeaten in the League since the middle of September. That is all undeniable.
Perhaps it’s just the case that this is the Grumpy Century. Perhaps it’s that broad feeling of unsettlement and resentment that seems to be gulfing the entire world at the moment manifesting itself at the top of the Premier League. Perhaps it’s a low-level dissatisfaction at the direction of the modern game. Perhaps it’s all of these factors and more.
And it will all be forgotten when the streets round Anfield are choking with red smoke and young men whose hayfever is playing them up are halfway lamp-posts with a can of beer in each hand making honking noises. West Ham, Leicester and Spurs next. Nothing can go wrong now, unless Virgil Van Dijk announces that he’s signing for Manchester United. That probably wouldn’t help. But at least Mo’s staying. That’s a cause for celebration, even in these uncertain times.