Mohamed Salah’s looming departure from Liverpool confers a financial benefit so obvious it is scarcely worth committing to print: the club will no longer have to foot the bill for the most highly-remunerated player in their history.
Salah’s salary, like those of most footballers, defies specifics and is subject to permutations. Yet even ballpark figures do the job of outlining how vast a saving his departure is going to create.
His basic weekly wage of £400,000 ($533,000) trumps most in world football; significant bonuses can and do take the sum far beyond that. Extrapolate that 52 times for a full year and you come to a huge annual outlay on one player.
A contract renewal signed last April was due to keep Salah on Merseyside until the summer of 2027, committing Liverpool to those huge ongoing costs for two further seasons. His leaving a year early on a free transfer naturally appears to halve that commitment — albeit we don’t know the exact terms of the mutual termination agreement Salah and the club have reached.
Shedding that commitment is useful to Liverpool for several reasons, not least the fact Salah’s on-field output has markedly declined this season.
The 33-year-old’s contract renewal was hardly the only hefty expenditure the club tied themselves to in 2025. Their captain and star defender Virgil van Dijk also renewed his own high-paying contract last April, again with terms running to the end of the 2026-27 season, just before he’ll turn 36 years old.
Then, in the summer transfer window, the club went on their largest spree ever, spending over £400million in fees, moves which naturally engendered sizeable salaries for the players signed. Even before the British-record deal for Newcastle striker Alexander Isak, The Athletic estimated Liverpool’s overall transfer and wage commitments on new faces topped half a billion pounds.
Liverpool’s wage bill cleared £400million for the first time in 2024-25, and even without a Premier League title this term, it’s likely the underlying figure there has gone up further since. That’s true even as they parted ways with several high earners last summer, such as Trent Alexander-Arnold, Darwin Nunez and Luis Diaz.
Sales of Nunez, Diaz and a slew more (including Alexander-Arnold, for whom Liverpool received a fee of around £8million from Real Madrid despite his contract being just a few weeks from its end, as they wanted him on board early to play for them in the Club World Cup last June) helped Liverpool manage the huge spend on new players, alongside those Salah and Van Dijk renewals.
Yet those sales are of finite benefit. Player profits factor into football’s financial rules but only over a period of three seasons. Beyond that, the savings made on wages remain but, as outlined, Liverpool brought in plenty of high earners last summer to replace their leavers.
Those arrivals joined on five- or six-year contracts, meaning Liverpool signed up to long-term costs which aren’t always thought of by onlookers in the here and now of a transfer window. The Athletic has previously outlined one way the club could offset the summer splurge in the future: allowing Salah and Van Dijk to depart when their renewed contracts end. With Salah now leaving a year in advance of that happening, it has added to the savings, making future commitments more affordable.
Seeing those two stalwarts move on next year at the latest was likely always to have been the plan at Anfield, but generating savings sooner has taken on greater importance as something else risks unfolding. Coach Arne Slot’s side sit fifth in the Premier League with seven games to go, flirting with the possibility of Liverpool playing no Champions League football next season for only the second time in 10 years.
Like several clubs, Liverpool’s finances have become reliant on continued Champions League qualification.
In 2023-24, when they had failed to qualify for the first time since 2016-17 and were instead playing in the second-tier Europa League, earnings from UEFA prize money dropped £50million and the club booked a record £57.1m pre-tax loss. Last season, with £82.5m earned from the Champions League’s new format, they returned to profitability.
Prize money from this season’s edition of UEFA’s blue-riband club competition is even higher. The Athletic estimates Liverpool have earned almost £95million already. The sum will be around £129m if they go on to win the whole thing. And that’s just prize money; Champions League success equals better takings at the gate and yields commercial revenue, too.
Even if they lose to defending champions Paris Saint-Germain in next month’s quarter-final, missing out on the 2026-27 Champions League would generate a big fall in income: Tottenham, last season’s Europa League winners, earned less than £35million in prize money from that success, less than half what Liverpool have banked so far from reaching the Champions League last eight.
With financial rules having shifted toward directly targeting player spending, such a drop-off in income can cause trouble for clubs who carry high wage bills and indulge in big transfer spending.
Liverpool have done both recently, and, even as they had plenty of room for manoeuvre through previous thrift, the removal of Salah’s big wages would help ease the blow if they were to miss out on the Champions League next year.