'I stopped Liverpool from buying Mohamed Salah two-and-a-half years earlier'

Liverpool tried to sign Mohamed Salah two-and-a-half years before the Egyptian ended up at Anfield, only for Jose Mourinho and Chelsea to steal in and win the race. And the Portuguese coach has a typically self-centered way of remembering what happened.

"When people say ‘you let Salah go’, I say exactly the opposite," Mourinho told The Obi One podcast last year. "I bought Salah. I was the one that said ‘buy that guy’. He was going from Basel to Liverpool, and I made a fight. I made a war to make him come to Chelsea.

"Then comes the part to be a Chelsea player, you need to perform or have to wait. He didn’t want to wait and wanted to go on loan and then Chelsea at a certain point decided to sell. That was not me."

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Having signed in January 2015, Salah only made a handful of appearances for Chelsea before he left and moved to AS Roma. After impressing there almost immediately, scoring almost a goal every other game over an two-year spell in Italy, Liverpool took him for what looked like a big fee in the summer of 2017.

Since then, though, Salah has scored 211 goals in 349 games for Liverpool, making his price tag look tiny. The Egyptian has won every trophy going and placed himself in the conversation for being the Reds' best-ever player.

Liverpool.com says: This summer, it is vital that Liverpool ties Salah down to a contract extension. His current deal expires in a year, by which time he will be 33. But Salah scored 25 times for the Reds last season and remains a hugely important figure.

It seems highly unlikely that his standards will drop dramatically in the next 12 months and he should be a player who can carry on at this level for another few years yet. The interest from Saudi Arabia will not go away in a rush but there is no reason for the forward to be thinking about that move for several seasons.