The question for me is does it help us in the transfer market and would it be more beneficial to get a year out of Salah.
I think the answer with the finances as they are and the fact we will probably recoup a similar amount in general sales this summer especially if we were to sell Neco is it doesn’t and we will already know what our targets cost, selling Salah probably just inflates that.
I’d keep him for another season, especially if he doesn’t go to the World Cup.
All of course if he doesn’t sign which I still don’t think is a distinct possibility.
How is that a strawman, exactly? Seems to me that saying that FSG isn’t on the verge of bankruptcy and can certainly afford to pay Mo is a fact that is materially relevant to the discussion here.
You can argue about whether it’s financially prudent to make that decision - whether he’ll be worth the wage increase considering his age, his value to the club, and the knock on effect it’ll have on other players and their wage desires. But that doesn’t mean that FSG are in the right here. FSG and Mo are two sides of the same coin, trying to squeeze every dollar they can out of LFC.
True but Aaron Rodgers isn’t going to be hard up just because he’s not married to a supermodel worth a fortune in her own right. Not stopped him signing a huge new contract that will have an impact the supporting cast the Packers can put around him.
Both will be multi millionaires at the end of their careers with earnings topping £200m giving them generational levels of wealth. One will have earned a bit more for himself though while the other will have seven rings from ten trips to the Superbowl. And counting.
I guess the choice for Mo is more money somewhere else or take a bit less at a club he knows will put him in the running for the top honours. If he can get both then fair play to him but you’d hope it would be about achievements and honours rather than the cash.
The point here is that FSG aren’t looking at one salary. They are looking at 20 or so. That’s why they aren’t really two sides of the same coin.
You mentioned the knock on effect on the squad, and this is the obvious stumbling block. We can certainly afford to give Mo 400k a week. But the next round of contract renewals are likely to get very messy indeed.
So I don’t think it’s fair to say that FSG are just trying to squeeze every dollar. They are trying to consider the impact on the club - already carrying one of the biggest wage bills in Europe - of knocking the high bar up another few notches.
I suspect that Mane is probably up there for not-given free kicks as well. The problem is that our forwards tend to play on rather than go to ground like a sack of spuds. There’s nothing wrong with that, I’d far rather see goals from open play and if the referees play advantage then I’m happy with that - except if an advantage doesn’t follow or there was serious foul play the game should be pulled back and a free kick given and/or an appropriate card given. That tends not to happen.
There also seems to be theme amongst the commentators that Salah goes down too easily. If Kane and the like go arse-over-tit because someone breathed on their aura he is “entitled to go down”. If Salah is kicked or tripped, he was “looking for it”. There was a match a couple of years ago where one of the pundits (might have been Shearer) came out with the “went down too easily” line on a rare occasion that Salah was awarded a penalty. He had been kicked 4 or 5 times in quick succession. I’m not sure which one he was adjudged to have gone down too easy on.
Interesting Times article, though. Stats don’t lie.
Yeah I knew Salah (and Mane) got a bad rub of the green but when you see the stats its staggering how badly Salah is treated. Mane isn’t actually that bad. Paul Tomkins did the first proper look at it;
Also “88.2% of statistics are made up on the spot”. – Vic Reeves
When I worked in the civil service part of my job was running off stats for ministerial questions. I had one horrible incident where a SPAD started screaming at me because the stats I produced didn’t match the point he was trying to make. I think what happened was that I produced the stats as impartial advice whereas the SPADs wanted to be professional lying cunts.
The only thing I would criticise about Tomkins post is that he includes international players (e.g. Messi) rather than only those playing in the Premier League although I suspect that if he did that it would make the graph even more stark. He made an interesting point about Jota, though. Is that a sign of differing football philosophy or actual club bias?
I find it incredible that some people still don’t see the clear bias against Liverpool Football Club.
Articles like Tomkins’ should be mandatory reading for the “LiVARpool” brigade. If any of them can actually read.
In fact, I’m going to send that to one of my mates, who is a Palace season ticket holder and believes the MOTD/Sky Sports waffle about Salah being a diver, and see what he says.
Reminds me of the time in equity research when I asked my boss if we were going to use multifactor analysis to determine what the price of a stock should be. He laughed and gave me a number and said that’s the price we’re recommending, work backwards from there and make the excel sheet fit it.
I’ll give my take on this, which might be completely wrong, but here goes: there might be club bias with a few refs, Kavanagh, Moss, Attwell. But the most important aspect of this is the refusal of our lads, obviously driven by Klopp, to play the gamesmanship game. Salah is an outstanding example of this. Whenever he gets fouled and the ref whistles or not, he immediately stands up and continues. More often than not, he’ll go to the other player afterwards and shake his hand with a smile on his face. It’s all about the game for him, not about getting a foul or a yellow card for the opponent.
That’s Klopp philosophy of how he sees football, and it’s ok. Numerous times, we’ve seen Mo continuing to play whilst being obviously fouled by another player, still keeping the ball and then pass it or score. So, I’m completely fine with it, it’s part of the DNA of our game. The limit would obviously be if there are blatant attacks on his health being ignored by the refs.
tomkins could find a statistical and rhetorical argument for Houllier’s Liverpool team being the most attacking and attractive in Europe. He starts with the pro-liverpool conclusion he wants and goes from there.
