Mohamed Salah has signed a new deal at Liverpool to keep him at the club for the next two years, and Reds boss Arne Slot is confident it will inspire more players to join
Arne Slot claims Mohamed Salah’s new £50million two-year deal will help Liverpool attract top talent this summer. Slot knows the champions elect will have to spend to freshen up their squad and he says Salah’s decision to stay is the perfect statement about Liverpool’s ambition.
Salah, 32, will earn nearly £500,000-a-week and Slot says this shows Liverpool are serious about continuing to move forward. “It’s a good message,” said the Reds head coach. “It shows that we’re ambitious, we want to keep a very good player like Mo Salah at this club.
“We’ve worked hard, and by we I mean the ownership, Michael Edwards and Richard Hughes, to achieve that. And that’s a good start for this summer, clearly. I think if I were to put myself in the shoes of a player that we might want to sign, it’s always nice for them to see that Mo has extended his contract. So that helps, but what helps the most is that we kept a quality player that scored seven or eight years in a row, so many goals for us.”
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Salah, 32, is third in Liverpool’s all-time scoring list behind Ian Rush and Roger Hunt with 243 goals and 109 assists in 394 appearances. Slot says the Egyptian star is a modern-day great for Liverpool and says his mentality makes him stand out.
“There are many players who can score goals, but Mo can score a goal if he’s not in the best half hour or the best 15 minutes,” he said. “That’s why he’s so mentally strong and you need that if you want to be seven or eight years at the highest level, every three or four days.
“Apart from quality, apart from physique, you need to be mentally very strong as well and I think how mentally strong he is is probably what stands out for me.”
Salah turns 33 in June, but is playing as well as ever for Liverpool this season and he has always prided himself in being in peak physical condition. Slot is confident he can continue to perform at this high level into his mid-30s.
“[The age] always depends on the player,” he said. “We have all the confidence in him that he can produce two more years like he has produced in the past seven or eight years. But also because he will make this team very strong next season.”
Slot claims Salah has little room for improvement because he is so good and quoted golfer and two-time US Open champion Bryson DeChambeau.
“I saw DeChambeau saying this at the Masters golf, and it was from Vince Lombardi, where he said ‘we’re all trying to reach perfection, which we’ll never reach, but we’ll reach excellence on the way’,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to do here as well.
“It’s clear that Mo is coming close to the end, not of his career, but his ability, and we’ve brought almost the maximum out of his qualities this season. Now it’s about consistency and that’s why he’s been such a star player.”
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