Mo Salah to Liverpool for a €42m fee is one of the biggest robberies in the transfer market of recent times.
Everton paid for more Gylfi Sigurdsson. They paid only slightly less for Michael Keane…
But Roma’s transfer honcho Monchi has explained that his club’s hands were tied last summer, when they eventually decided to offload the Egyptian.
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The Italians had to balance their books by the end of June to avoid problems with FFP, firstly, and secondly, Neymar’s barbaric €200m fee made all the deals that went before it look cheap.
As a result, he’s suggested the fee Roma got was good business, at the time.
“On Salah there are two important things to understand,” Monchi said, reported in ESPN.
“First, Salah was sold before the Neymar effect revolutionised the market. Second, we had a necessity to sell Salah before June 30.
“Anyone who understands a bit of this business knows that that’s like having a sword pointed at your neck,” Monchi said.
“So taking into account these two conditions, I think we made a sale that was fairly big.
“True, he then became an incredible player and with the Neymar effect and Mbappe, Dembele, Coutinho, he surely demands a higher price now. But these two things are important to understand. Otherwise it seems that Monchi is a bit blind.
“It’s strange, because he returned to a league where he didn’t perform well in before when he was at Chelsea. But he found a coach that believed in him and great teammates. It’s a squad that suits his style of football more.”
In many ways, we feel slightly sorry for Roma and their fans.
Salah’s actual value in the transfer market now is arguably beyond the Neymar fee – and they let him go for a comparative pittance.
Since signing for Liverpool, the 25-year-old has notched 36 goals in all competitions and looks set to become the highest scoring Premier League player of all time.
He likely holds the key to our chances in the Champions League, too.
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