Spanish meltdown robs Salah of leverage in negotiation game
There are different rules for those players at the very pinnacle of the game – the small knot of the elite atop the long, tapering list encompassing the mediocre, the good, the excellent and then those among whom Mohamed Salah now finds himself.
The Liverpool striker is approaching the great financial reckoning of his career with most of the aces: high returns on the pitch, a proven track record in the big games, a key role in one of Europe’s best sides, a Pepsi endorsement. He is 28, with two years remaining on his Liverpool contract come the summer, and the time has come to grasp what will be the most lucrative contract of his career – be it at Anfield or, as he intimated with the lightest of brushstrokes, perhaps elsewhere.
Just a handful of Premier League players get to play the card that says a dream awaits them unfulfilled at the Bernabeu or Nou Camp. Eden Hazard was the last, back in 2019 in those faraway pre-covid days. A move to Spain was, for so long, the final page of the negotiation playbook for the Premier League’s best footballers – some of whom went and some of whom stayed with improved contracts. So ingrained did it become that it must be hard to accept it has now gone.
Real Madrid and Barcelona are drowning in debt. The sort of debt that makes their finances precarious for the foreseeable future and certainly in no shape to accomplish the kind of cashmountain, high-friction, hostile purchase required to prise a player such as Salah away from a club such as Liverpool. Their financial results are a matter of public record, and those results say Real and Barca are struggling to pay the players they have, let alone others they might like to have.
But old tactics die hard, and so pre-christmas came Salah’s interview with the newspaper AS. The very act of granting an audience to a Spanish paper was enough to get a message across, regardless of what little he actually said. There was a conciliatory tone this week when he spoke to the Norwegian channel TV2 as part of a club-arranged run of interviews. “I do not know,” he said of his future. “If you ask, I say I want to stay here as long as I can, but, as I have said before, it is in the hands of the club.”
It certainly is: the dynamic has changed. The pressure from Spain’s two biggest clubs is no longer there and English clubs know it. Years of debt accumulation and poor economic management by Real and Barcelona, now accelerated by
Covid-19, have left them struggling to survive financially.
This season even their domestic dominance can no longer be taken for granted. When it comes to Salah’s future, who might Liverpool be bidding against other than themselves? Paris St-germain and Manchester City may still be able to afford him, but for the cost financially and otherwise, it would be hard to make the case.
No wonder Real Madrid’s president, Florentino Perez, was widely reported in Spain this week to be meeting with the European Super League apostle Andrea Agnelli, chairman of Juventus. It cannot come soon enough for Perez’s club, where the next great problem is their six-monthly wage bill on June 30.
Their debt has been swollen by a €575 million (£510 million) bond scheme to rebuild the Bernabeu, with additional costs of
€160 million. They have statebacked loans of €205 million, which got them through the summer wage payments. They are €140 million in arrears on salaries. There is a loan of around
€130 million from the US hedge fund Providence along with other bank debts and payments on transfers that would take their combined debt to well in excess of €1billion. The terms of the bonds for the stadium debt crucially restrict spending on transfers if the club’s revenues from the stadium are not at a certain threshold, and currently there is no end in sight to the supporter lockout.
It is just as dire at Barcelona, the players joining the club’s list of creditors this January by deferring €172million in salaries from the half-year payment wage bill. The Liga salary cap, which is calculated according to future revenue, tells its own story for Barca. Last season, in pre-covid times, it was projected at €671.4million. This season it has fallen to €382.7million, a reflection of the huge shortfall in earnings for the club. Although as a cap it only exists as a guide, those obligations to the contracts agreed with players still exist.
These financial troubles of Spain’s two greatest clubs once felt like its game’s naughty secret, but they are now part of the conversation, mentioned often by a perpetually discontented Lionel Messi, by stand-in Barcelona president Carlos Tusquets, by even its bombastic media. The party is over, and the European Super League – or a radically reformed Champions League – is not so much a new frontier as a potential financial lifesaver.
The last Premier League star to slip over the divide was Hazard, a deal that now looks absurd – for the price it exacted from Real and the profound lack of on-pitch change it delivered. The notion that Real or Barcelona were the natural endpoint for all great careers, and the dimension that added to contract negotiations for a player such as Salah – all that has been swept away by the financial meltdown.
If that contract is to be signed by Salah at Liverpool then the terms will no doubt reflect his status as one of the world’s leading players, but as for leverage, it will not come from Spain. The boards of Real and Barcelona along with Athletic Bilbao and Osasuna – the four clubs who are owned by their members – recently successfully lobbied the Spanish government to remove their directors’ personal liability for their club’s finances.
They know what is coming.
Pressure from Spain’s two biggest clubs is no longer there – and English clubs know it