Kieran Maguire has urged Liverpool to be cautious when offering an extension to Mo Salah’s contract.
The Egyptian international is said to be demanding wages of between £300-380k-a-week, as reported by the Independent.
“If they have any sense, they’ll look at the total cost of the player over the next three or four years. That cost is transfer fee plus wages,” the finance expert told Football Insider.
“Liverpool need to extend the contract for a sensible period of time and not lock themselves into those wages for too long.
“If they pay him £300,000-a-week, that’s £36.2m for two years. If they get another two years out of him for that price, that’s got to be brilliant value.”
The former Roma frontman’s current terms are set to expire in the summer of 2023.
There’s some amount of concern that, if left unattended, we could see a repeat of the Gini Wijnaldum fiasco, in which we lose a player who didn’t really wish to depart in the first place.
It’s even more troubling, of course, given that we’re talking about a player of Salah’s calibre; as good as our former No.5 was, he wasn’t quite earning comparisons to the likes of Leo Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
Maguire’s advice certainly makes a great deal of sense in terms of avoiding paying an astronomical sum for a player who simply isn’t contributing to the same standard as was the case in their peak years.
However, the early signs coming from the Egyptian – not to mention his impeccable attention to conditioning – would suggest that a two-year extension would be far from unreasonable.