SALAH THE CENTURY
How Liverpool exploited Roma cash crisis to grab Player of the Year Mo for just £38M and pull off...
LIVERPOOL cleverly seized on a cash squeeze at Roma to get Mo Salah on the cheap.
Roma’s director of football Monchi last night revealed his club were forced to sell the newly-crowned Player of the Year for £38million to dodge punishment by UEFA for Financial Fair Play breaches.
He claimed that, unless the club balanced the books by June 30 last year, they would have been kicked out of the Champions League.
That meant Liverpool could do a favourable deal now being described as the “sale of the century”. Monchi
said: “We had to sell, we had no option but to sell Salah before June 30. Had we not done that, we probably wouldn’t be playing the Champions League semi-final as we had UEFA closely monitoring us.
“We didn’t want to sell him, but we had no choice. He wanted to leave, but we would have kept him if the regulations weren’t against us.”
Salah came back to haunt Roma with two goals and two assists as the Reds stormed into a 5-0 first leg lead, before being pegged back by two late replies.
Anfield defender Dejan Lovren (top) paid tribute to his team-mate and said: “When people talk about Messi and Ronaldo, they should also talk about Salah.
“He deserves the credit, but he deserves even more, to be honest.”
Salah is just five goals away from breaking the all-time Anfield scoring record of Ian Rush (above), and has, potentially, five games to do it.
“I don’t know if this is the right time to put pressure on him, but he must be regarded as one of the best three in the world,” added Lovren.
“It looks easy what he does, but it is very difficult. He deserves to be mentioned for the Ballon d’Or.”