Mohamed Salah celebrated his goal in Liverpool’s 5-1 win over Tottenham by taking a selfie with fans, but his actions weren’t quite as spontaneous as first thought
It is a picture that could come to define Liverpool’s triumphant 2024/25 Premier League season: Mohamed Salah, with a huge smile on his face, celebrating a goal in front of the club’s fans at Anfield by taking a selfie.
Salah’s selfies have been almost as frequent as his goals this season. A quick scroll through his Instagram account reveals numerous snaps of him posing with his team-mates in the dressing room after games. They give Liverpool fans an insight into the dressing room dynamic and into the happiness of their star player, who has committed to another two years at the club.
But the selfie on Sunday took things to a new level. After cutting inside onto his trusty left foot and firing into the corner, Salah ran over to the fans to celebrate.
He was handed a phone and proceeded to take a photo with the delighted supporters behind him. Commentating on Sky Sports, Gary Neville speculated that the phone belonged to a fan, providing a wholesome story.
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Yet it didn’t take long for that illusion to crumble as the more cynical observers got to work. They pointed out that Salah had been given the phone by a Liverpool employee. And, crucially, that the phone in question happened to be a Google Pixel – a sponsor of Liverpool.
It didn’t stop the photo from going viral. Salah and Liverpool posted it on Instagram, where it has racked up 1.7m likes. On X, it has been viewed 14m times.
“At the beginning of the season I always take selfies with players [who score], so for this one I said ‘OK, I have to think of something special because it’s a picture that’s going to be there forever’,” Salah told BBC Sport when asked about the selfie. “Yeah, I worked my mind a little bit around ideas and it was fine.”
His explanation could be taken at face value, but it doesn’t wash for those in the know. As BBC Sport notes, it doesn’t appear to break any FA rules and Salah was not booked for delaying the restart. But the selfie has sparked a lot of discussion among sports marketing and sponsorship experts, who have been split. Was it a clever product activation, or did they overstep the mark to taint the spontaneity of true celebration?
“Sponsors need to add value to the fan experience, not interrupt it. Finding that balance can be hard and I think Google Pixel overplayed their hand this time – at least in the live environment,” sports sponsorship expert Malph Mimms wrote on LinkedIn.
“It felt fake, something more aligned to WWE rather than Premier league football. For those who didn’t watch the game live the resulting images likely raise a smile and have a positive impact, but watching live it was a distraction.
“How could have this been avoided? Just take one picture. It was the repetition of Salah doing it several time that undermined it. It’s certainly subjective, and I’m sure some fans didn’t care, but for me it was a little too intrusive.”
Others disagreed. “Credit where credit’s due, LFC media team. The moment was brilliantly leveraged,” another sports marketing expert, Dawid Prokopowicz, wrote in a LinkedIn post.
“It wasn’t exactly innovative but it was inspired and as partnership activations go, pretty well executed… and WOW has it had some coverage,” wrote Michael Afflick, the vice president of marketing at Fanatics, to a post bemoaning the commercialisation of football.
One thing is for sure: such marketing strategies are working. Liverpool made an annual pre-tax loss of £57m in the period up to May 31 2024, yet its commercial income actually increased by £36m to reach a record high of £308m, mainly down to growth in partnerships and retail.
Speaking about partnerships with UPS, Peloton, Google and Orion, Liverpool’s chief commercial officer, Ben Latty, told the Liverpool Echo earlier this month: “They put their trust and faith in us, they have marketing budgets, that they can also quite easily go and spend elsewhere, so it is up to us to make sure that we are giving them a return on investment in terms of their investment into the club and delivering on what they set us out to deliver. It’s so competitive out there, not only in sports but in marketing in general.”
Mirror Football contacted Liverpool to request comment on the Salah selfie but did not receive a reply.
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