The Times reports that Mohamed Salah was the first to raise the prospect of terminating his Liverpool contract this summer after deciding he no longer wished to work under manager Arne Slot. The breakdown followed a run of events that included Salah being benched for three matches in a row in December. Salah famously took aim at Slot in December after being benched for three matches in a row, claiming he was being forced out and scapegoated for Liverpool\u2019s poor start to the season.<\/p>\n
Slot has acknowledged his part in the situation, saying he does not mind being known as the \u201cbad guy\u201d for his role in Salah\u2019s exit, while denying he is solely responsible and pointing to Salah\u2019s spells out of the team under former boss J\u00fcrgen Klopp. Liverpool had shown clear commitment to Salah by offering him a two-year contract last summer after one of the all-time great individual seasons in 2024\u201325.<\/p>\n
Those facts underline the difficulty of the club\u2019s decision. Salah has been Liverpool\u2019s best player over the past decade and sits close to the top of the club\u2019s all-time rankings. Yet the relationship with the manager, a perceived dip in output once a sequence of fortuitous results ended, and growing criticism of his performances this season combined to change the situation drastically over the past 12 months.<\/p>\n
There is a view inside and outside the club that responsibility for Liverpool\u2019s struggles has been widely shared, with an argument that Dominik Szoboszlai is the only player worthy of praise. But Salah is judged by different financial standards. His new contract includes a salary of around $540,000 (\u00a3400,000) per week. If Salah is no longer the version of himself from 2024\u201325, Liverpool cannot justify paying him a salary bettered only by Manchester City striker Erling Haaland among all Premier League players.<\/p>\n
The club\u2019s hand, the report suggests, has been forced by a combination of falling form, heightened expectations and the fractured relationship between player and manager.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Times: Salah opened talks to end his Liverpool contract after losing trust in Arne Slot. report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13263,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,172,1163],"tags":[299,1305,1304],"class_list":["post-13264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-liverpool","category-epl","category-transfers","tag-arne-slot","tag-bench-selection","tag-benching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13264\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}