“More in than out,” read the message across the club’s social media pages at 8am on Friday, around 36 hours after reports in the forward’s homeland of Egypt first suggested he had agreed to extend his eight-year stay at Anfield.

It was a play on words, nodding to Salah’s comments in November when his future on Merseyside felt far more tenuous. The fact that he felt “more out than in” after scoring two crucial goals in a 3-2 come-from-behind win at Southampton that day was confirmation that the process of his contract negotiations has not exactly been smooth. Although Liverpool always felt confident a successful resolution would be reached, that scenario was not inevitable.

Salah has signed a two-year extension, with no breaks or release clauses on terms very similar to the ones that almost certainly made him the second-highest-paid player in the Premier League behind Manchester City striker Erling Haaland.

While his previous contract included a basic weekly salary of £350,000 ($480,000), when bonuses and performance-related incentives were taken into account, Salah’s package was worth far more. Including external commercial endorsements, some of which also had performance-related clauses, he earned up to £1 million per week.

This new contract’s lucrative nature reflects Salah’s status and his ongoing excellence, even though he’ll turn 33 in June. After scoring 243 goals in 394 games, he is set to complete a decade’s service at Anfield.

Discussions on this latest deal have been a drawn-out process, rather than there being any breakthrough ‘moment’ and have taken nearly a year. The path has not been straightforward.

The Athletic has talked to figures with intimate knowledge of those negotiations, who spoke to us on condition of anonymity to protect relationships, to understand why they took so long, how both parties approached them and what ultimately clinched an agreement.

Ramy Abbas, the Colombian lawyer who is Salah’s long-time representative, does not like discussing sensitive matters on his phone. For him, it is convenient that services such as WhatsApp are banned from receiving or making calls in the United Arab Emirates, where he lives.

Although messages are permitted, hundreds of them are usually left unread on his accounts, many from potential commercial partners looking to work with his most famous client. A note on his WhatsApp profile warns: “Voice notes ignored. If you’re late, I will leave.”

Abbas is transactional, he likes efficiency and he prefers to meet in person.

When Liverpool signed Salah in the summer of 2017, their sporting director at the time, Michael Edwards and chief scout Dave Fallows flew to Dubai out of respect for Abbas. They wanted to show him how keen they were to sign Salah from Roma.

Having arrived in the evening when it was already dark, they headed home to England a few hours later without ever taking their jumpers off. On that return journey, the pair joked they must be the only visitors to leave the Gulf resort without experiencing any sun on their backs.

That negotiation was relatively straightforward due to Salah’s enthusiasm for a return to the Premier League, where he felt he had much to prove having barely played during a previous spell with Chelsea.

When Liverpool’s new sporting director, Richard Hughes, picked up the phone to introduce himself to Abbas in July last year, however, there was much work to do.

Hughes had inherited significant challenges at Liverpool, starting with the recruitment of a manager/head coach to succeed Jurgen Klopp, who stepped down at the end of last season after almost nine years. Following the hiring of Feyenoord coach Arne Slot to fill that vacancy, Hughes moved on to player retention: as with Salah, there was only 11 months left on the contracts of the team’s captain, Virgil van Dijk and his deputy, Trent Alexander-Arnold, the Liverpudlian local hero.

Alexander-Arnold’s case was different to the others in that he was in his mid-twenties, and had active interest from Real Madrid. Salah and Van Dijk were in their early thirties, and while still performing at an elite level, Liverpool were conscious that their previous contracts had been agreed when both were at the peak of their powers.

The mantra from Liverpool and the club’s owners at Fenway Sports Group (FSG) was the need to ignore the question of, ‘What looks like the right decision today?’ and rather frame it as, ‘What will look like the right decision in future?’

That first conversation between Hughes and Abbas was brief and casual, with the sporting director promising that he would be in touch again soon to discuss Salah’s future. Like Edwards and Fallows had years earlier, Hughes would subsequently travel to Dubai to see Abbas, going twice before the end of 2024.

The first meeting, in late September, was held in the bar of one of the city’s quieter restaurants but the discussion was again short and informal until Hughes asked Abbas whether Salah wanted to stay at Liverpool. Abbas told him that he did, but the sporting director flew back to the UK with Abbas concerned the club might not be willing to maintain his client’s level of remuneration.

Abbas was impressed by Hughes but was left asking himself whether Liverpool valued Salah quite as much as they used to. He wondered whether the lack of commitment represented a hostile act.

As far as Salah was concerned, he was operating at the same level as the best players on the planet and showing no signs of slowing up despite a disappointing end to last season after sustaining a hamstring injury at the Africa Cup of Nations in January 2024. The goals and assists were flowing.

Salah and Abbas understood the player’s salary would be in line with what he might achieve in the future but they wanted to sustain his position as one of world football’s best-paid players.

Liverpool, for their part, maintain that a pay cut was never on the agenda and that they always wanted to keep Salah. They had no issue with Salah pushing for the best possible terms and FSG had, after all, sanctioned lucrative deals for players – including Salah – worth the investment. They were also conscious of the need to try to find common ground with Abbas before tabling a formal offer.

There was also an acknowledgement, however, that any deal could not run counter to FSG’s sustainable financial model and had to be in the best interests of the club. For Liverpool’s owners, this principle could not be sacrificed, regardless of how valuable Salah was to the team’s chances of on-pitch success.

Until Manchester City’s Rodri won it at age 28 last year, Ballon d’Or winners over the previous decade had all been in their early to mid-thirties and he wasn’t turning 33 until June 2025. Salah believed that his goals fuelling a successful Liverpool side would allow him to follow legends such as Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Luka Modric and Karim Benzema in winning that award, recognising the best footballer of the previous 12 months.

Hughes had travelled to that first meeting alone but Abbas wondered about Edwards’ involvement behind the scenes. Although he now officially worked for FSG, rather than the club, it was ultimately his responsibility to manage the budgets in the organisation’s football interests. Liverpool were not in financial distress. Although the club was expected to post a loss before tax for the 2023-24 season, it remained well within the limits for profit and sustainability rules (PSR) for the following campaign.

When Salah last renewed with Liverpool in July 2022, a deal which made him the highest-paid player in the club’s history, the contract was brokered and signed off by FSG president Mike Gordon. Julian Ward had succeeded Edwards as Liverpool’s sporting director but the meatier conversations were between Gordon and Abbas. That negotiation was a slog and Abbas and Salah both felt that the player’s future lay elsewhere just three weeks before an agreement was reached.

Abbas was unsure whether a resolution would have been found had Edwards led that process. He had brokered a complex package that was realistically achievable but, on a basic level, more lucrative than the figure suggested publicly. He was proud of the deal, realising that the club and their owners had extended themselves as far as they could to keep Salah, and even allowed the prestigious Harvard Business School in the United States to turn it into a case study.

Mohamed Salah signs his previous contract in 2022, along with Ramy Abbas (facing away from camera), and club officials Jonathan Bamber and Julian Ward (Nick The revelation that FSG had authorised a record-breaking deal to keep Liverpool’s star man meant it was more difficult for any of its critics to accuse it of being tight with money but it also suited the owners to keep the figures lower. If it was known that Salah was earning considerably more than some of his team-mates, there was a danger that Liverpool’s pay structure would spiral out of control.

FSG brought Edwards back into the organisation in March last year to try to re-establish a chain of command that existed at Liverpool before it became a manager-led operation under Klopp. The owners knew how ruthless Edwards could be. Yet beyond him and Hughes, Abbas could not shake the feeling that Gordon would also still be involved when it came to the final figures, if the negotiations ever got to that stage. FSG’s money was ultimately Gordon’s, and he would be the one signing off any deal.

In a second Dubai meeting between Abbas and Hughes in October, the conversation didn’t move on very far, with the lawyer concluding the discussion was light on meaningful content. It was his view that negotiations had not even really started. Abbas’ policy had always been to let the club make the first move, allowing him to see clearly how highly they valued his client. The lack of pace or urgency worried him.

Towards the end of November, Abbas did not know how much Liverpool were willing to pay Salah or how long they wanted him to stay. Though he was told there was an offer in the making, nothing happened. He was confident Liverpool would deliver on their promise eventually, but was increasingly beginning to think it would only be done to save face, allowing the club to claim they had tried to keep Salah — even though they knew the offer made to him would be rejected.

This explains why, on November 24, after he’d scored twice in the second half to inspire that win at Southampton, the player decided to speak to journalists about his future, telling them he was disappointed not to have received a new contract offer, before making his “more out than in” comments regarding the 2025-26 season.

• A Tell Media report / Republished with permission of The Athletic