Liverpool have played a Salah blinder in the name of net spend | OneFootball

Have Liverpool financially played a blinder with Mo Salah? They will get a transfer fee in January for a past-it player.

Arne Slot may even get to play his favourite formation. Send your mails on any subject – not just Salah – to theeditor@football365.com

Liverpool > $alah

Financially Liverpool have played this right. Here’s the lowdown:

Salah overachieved last season – and was close to being out of contract. So Liverpool sign him up for another two years. Prevents him leaving on a free.

Salah reverts to norm/worse this season, but people can still remember his heyday, hence worth loads.

He leaves in Jan (to Saudis), and Liverpool get a massive transfer fee.

Liverpool return the top of the net spend league, and all are happy.

The winner of the net spend league from each country gets a nomination in the FIFA Peace Prize for next season, as it definitely wasn’t a one-off.

Even those at Liverpool are affected by age. You don’t build a team around 33/34 year olds, regardless of the “this means more” factor.

Nothing strange has happened here. “Commentators” like Carragher will have a shouty, spitty rant. The sooner Sky allow us to have our own AI commentators, “Angry Scouse”, “Excitable Scotsman” etc, the better. Is anyone really learning anything from Carragher/McMoist? Simon S, NUFC, Cheshire

Has Salah allowed Slot to build his best Liverpool XI?

So first of all, let’s be clear, there’s been loads wrong with Liverpool this season. Salah’s poor form and outburst is one of those things, but by no means the only or worst thing.

Konate has been the worst defender in the league. Kerkez has still not settled. They can’t keep a proper right-back fit for a run of games. Wirtz has been nothing better than merely ok, which is short of what anyone might have reasonably expected. Isak has, frankly, been dreadful. Slot has been making several weird selection and in-game tactical decisions, which is unlike him.

It’s been a sh*tshow.

But several more informed observers than myself have pointed out that Slot’s real preference, as it was at Feyenoord, is for a 4-3-1-2. On Tuesday night at Inter we saw it for the first time. And for the first time this season, Liverpool looked like a team again. They looked like a side that was solid, hard to beat. Not the one that has spent most of this season with a red carpet rolled out down the middle of the pitch for the opposition to walk through.

There could well be mileage in the idea that by hook or by crook, Slot has finally got to where he wanted to be all along. Time will tell on that, but if so, Salah (who would never fit that formation in a million years) might well have done him a favour. Andy H, Swansea

Salah could learn from Son

While the Salah circus is dominating the headlines, another club legend came back to say goodbye to the Spurs fans…Heung Min Son. While Sonny wasn’t quite at the level of Salah as a player, he was still one of the best in the league for 10 years and a true Spurs legend who will be forever loved by the fans.

The reason for the comparison is that last season, as with Mo now, age clearly started to catch up with Sonny, and he wasn’t the devastating player he used to be. That split second of sharpness was gone and he just wasn’t capable of doing what he could in previous years.

As a fan it was a bit sad to see at times, and rightly, Sonny was often left out of the starting 11, including for the biggest game of the season, the Europa League final. Whatever went on behind the scenes, publicly Sonny put his ego aside, was nothing but professional all season, continued to give 100% every game, despite his legs not always allowing him to do what he wanted them to, and accepted his role as captain/squad player.

He then left on great terms with the club, got a nice send off in Korea over the summer, still got a lucrative move (nice to see him smashing it up in the MLS as well), has a Mural on Tottenham High Road and came back to a hero’s welcome at the game last night. How much of that has Salah thrown out the window with his recent toys-out-the-prammery? Maybe Mo could learn a thing or 2 from our Sonny about true class. Gary, Croydon

Xabi Alonso in, is it?

…Somewhere in Boston, in the wake of the Salah saga, Michael Edwards minimizes the window with his “Executive Strategy for Supporting Arne Slot” memo and opens his “Club Strategy for Installing Xabi Alonso in 2026” Google doc. R Harris, NYC

On foreign managers and work permits

Opinions about Mo Salah, Jamie Carragher and Liverpool are like assholes in that everybody’s got one. Mine is that everybody involved is an utter piece of sh*t, but that would make for a short mail, and it’s not why I’m writing in. (Though I’d love to see some discussion of Micah Richards clowning Carragher over his social media wankery on yesterday’s UCL broadcast.)

And it’s been a long time since I’ve written in about Newcastle, the reason being that I haven’t been able to hold a single opinion about the team or the manager in my head for more than a week. Every positive has been balanced by a negative, and I can’t make my mind up what I’ve been seeing. Also, bitterness over Isak, only now being relieved by his ass-ness for Liverpool. So that’s not why I’m writing in, either.

Rather, I’m wondering why work permits don’t work the same for managers as for players. To play in England, a player has to be of international quality, as evinced by playing a certain proportion of international fixtures. Now, it would seem unfair to limit the hiring of foreign managers the same way because there are only 211 nations in FIFA, which would provide a “labor” pool of only about 410 active national team managers of either gender (about twenty nations don’t have women’s teams). There are about 113 fully professional men’s clubs in England who could conceivably hire a foreign manager, and 24 women’s clubs.

But surely there should be some winnowing criteria? I mean, some of these guys don’t make it three months at their English clubs (This is true of English managers too, of course, but that just means that there are plenty of crap managers to hire at home as well as abroad). If the aim is to protect English jobs by ensuring they can be taken only by foreigners of particularly high ability, why isn’t there anything in place to achieve that goal when it comes to managers, other than clubs’ own (often comically inept) efforts at screening for the best candidates?

To the extent that Brexit was about economic issues at all (and not about economic fables motivated by race and class), one would think protectionism would be as much a priority in this industry as in any other. And certainly, there are those in the press who advocate for the precedence of British managers, albeit in jingoistic terms. Is unfettered access for Manchester United, Chelsea, et al to foreign managerial talent just that sacrosanct to the English people?

Or perhaps 140 jobs just aren’t worth making policy over, no matter how lucrative and prominent? Chris C, Toon Army DC

…If Egypt and Iran don’t want to be involved in the world cup pride match, then they can just both forfeit the game.

Simple solution. Chris, NUFC

…I’ve just read your article about Egypt requesting the Pride Match to be… What, switched? To have no celebration at all? To pretend that no LGBTQ+ people exist? It’s not clear to me what they’re asking, other than they want no part of it.

It’s the perfect match to hold this celebratory event. I hope the majority of spectators at this match would be respectful to their fellow humans, but if not, let the world see the response of any bigots within the fan bases of Egypt and Iran. This is what Pride is all about, right? Demonstrating the right for all people to be who they are in the face of prejudice and ignorance.