Mohamed Salah changed Liverpool. English football changed him

At a Yemeni restaurant in Liverpool, two Egyptians are arguing about Mohamed Salah. “What’s happening is that I am a life-long Liverpool fan, and you are a Mohamed Salah fan,” Mohammed Nagy, a doctor who has lived in the city for six years, tells his compatriot Ahmed, who has been here for 11 years.

Ahmed, a bowl of ful medames in front of him, doesn’t agree.

“In Egypt, you will find people who idolise him and you will find people who are critical of him, whatever he does. And you will always hear his contract and salary brought into this,” he says.

“Always it’s the money you are hearing of, as if he should be paying money to Liverpool.”

Nagy sees the money as being central to the problem. “I’m furious with him. Football is a team sport. You don’t spit your dummy out and talk about the team and the manager just because you’re not playing,” he says.

“It’s blood capitalism. I hate it.”

It is Saturday lunchtime at the Palm restaurant on Mount Pleasant, in Liverpool’s city centre. In a couple of hours, Liverpool will play Brighton. Mohamed Salah will come on as a substitute, taking the corner that leads to Liverpool’s second goal, making him the player with more goals and assists for one club than any other in the Premier League era.

After the final whistle, Salah takes his time on the pitch, applauds the Anfield crowd as they serenade their “Egyptian king”. 

But after accusing the club of “throwing me under the bus” a week earlier and saying his relationship with manager Arne Slot had broken down, Salah’s future remains unclear. 

“You know what? I love him, but he shouldn’t have said what he said,” Phil, a Liverpool fan in his fifties, tells MEE outside the ground just before the game.

Now Salah is in Morocco with Egypt’s national team for the Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon). 

Liverpool play their first game without him against Spurs on Saturday, while Egypt face Zimbabwe on Monday night. It is an auspicious moment for one of the greatest and most famous Muslims to grace the football field. 

An Egyptian friend of Salah’s tells MEE the forward believed, before his outburst, that Liverpool wanted to sell him, to take his £400,000 per week salary off the books and cash in while they could. 

Speaking on Arabic television, Salah’s idol, Egyptian footballing icon Mohamed Aboutrika, said much the same thing.

Playing through a tumultuous time in Egypt’s political and sporting history, Salah has never won the Afcon. 

He is a hero in his home country, but he has angered many in Egypt and across the Muslim world with his reticence to speak out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

“A lot of people are standing behind him because he’s one of us, but there is some schadenfreude because of his response to Gaza,” Nagy says.

The boy from the Nile Delta, who used to take three-to-five-hour microbus rides to and from training in Cairo, is seen now by some as a remote superstar, a western-facing brand with property in Dubai and deals with Pepsi.

Aged 33 and having claimed every major trophy with Liverpool, Salah’s legacy - on the pitch, in the city, across England and the world - is now being assessed as fans consider the possibility that this will be his last season at the club.

Salah changes the terraces

At the Palm restaurant, the lamb mandi, bread and mint tea arrive. 

Yemenis have been part of Liverpool’s social fabric since the late 19th century, when they began coming to the port cities of Wales and the northwest and northeast of England looking for work.

There is now a diverse Muslim population of over 25,000 in Liverpool, centred mostly around the inner-city area of Toxteth. Events like the annual World in One City tournament highlight the community’s connection to football.

Nagy sips his tea. He arrived on Merseyside after Salah and says the hospital he works in now has more than 20 other Egyptian doctors. Almost all of them came to the UK in the last 10 years, following Egypt’s 2011 revolution and the subsequent military coup led by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. 

Though he is furious with Salah because of his behaviour at Liverpool, because of his response to Gaza, because he feels as though he has become a faceless brand and much more, Nagy acknowledges the impact the Egyptian has had on wider British attitudes to Muslims.

The doctor says that a white nurse at his hospital told him once: “I know it shouldn’t be this way, but Muslims in this city are treated well now because of Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane.” 

Ahmed moved to Liverpool before Salah and before Sadio Mane, the Senegalese forward who, like his Egyptian teammate and sometime rival, became a Liverpool legend. 

Ahmed says that, in those early days, when he mentioned he was a Muslim, “people used to ask me how many wives I had”. 

“Things changed a lot when Salah came… It’s unusual for someone with that level of fame to be a Muslim. It got people asking about Islam,” Ahmed says. 

This could be felt on the terraces of Anfield and inside the mosques of the city. 

Adam Kelwick, an imam at the Abdullah Quilliam mosque close to the city centre, tells MEE that Salah inspired white Liverpudlians to visit his mosque. The lives of some of these visitors would be profoundly changed as a result.

“In the mosque we had people visiting to find out more about Islam, especially in the early days,” Kelwick, who became famous in the UK in the aftermath of the Southport riot of 2024 for embracing protesters outside his mosque, says of Salah’s impact on Liverpool. “We had people - white scousers - convert because of him. When I asked them how their journey started, they would tell me it was Mo Salah.”

These Liverpudlians embracing Islam were following in the footsteps of the mosque’s 19th-century founder, William Henry Quilliam, who converted from Christianity to Islam and changed his name as a result. 

This is a piece of symmetry Kelwick enjoys. “You’re introducing people to their heritage,” he says of the white Liverpudlians who convert today.

Quilliam was also a friend of John Houlding, who founded Liverpool Football Club in 1892, shortly after the mosque - the first in Britain - had been established in 1887. The two men hosted early inter-faith discussions with Muslims, Christians and Jews all taking part.  

Kelwick says Salah “took the city by storm”, and that as a Muslim footballer who prostrated himself after every goal he scored, he did “wonders for community relations”.

This contention is backed up by an academic study published in 2021, which found that after Salah arrived, “hate crimes in the Liverpool area dropped by 16 percent compared with a synthetic control, and that Liverpool FC fans halved their rates of posting anti-Muslim tweets relative to fans of other top-flight clubs”.

Kelwick fondly recalls some of the chants Liverpool fans sing for Salah, which reference his faith. “If he’s good enough for you, he’s good enough for me, if he scores another few, then I’ll be Muslim too. If he’s good enough for you, he’s good enough for me, sitting in a mosque that’s where I want to be.” 

Otto Mellouki, a Moroccan who helps run Bakchich on Liverpool’s Bold Street, got to know Salah in those early days, when the Egyptian and his wife Magi would come to his restaurant. “He was very polite and very humble,” he says. “We are both from Arab countries that love football, so that’s what we talked about.”

Mellouki, who thinks of himself as a “Moroccan Scouser”, tells MEE that in Toxteth now, “everyone wants their kid to be Mohamed Salah”. 

“The city has welcomed Salah with open arms. He’s a huge source of pride to Muslims. He also got my daughters into football,” he says. 

“He’s done so much for Liverpool and Liverpool has done so much for him.”

‘He doesn’t even live in the city’

But while Salah has changed Liverpool, becoming an international superstar, one who in 2023 was earning at least £1m per week, English football has changed him.

“When he first came to Liverpool, he would come to the mosques, and people loved it,” Kelwick says. Salah has two daughters now, and has moved away from Merseyside to the “golden triangle” area of Cheshire, where he says his family is “very happy”.

Back at the Palm restaurant, Ahmed, who has met Salah, believes the footballer struggled with the attention paid to him in the mosques of Liverpool. While Sadio Mane could spend two hours talking to people and taking photos with them, Salah was less at ease.

“He doesn’t like being surrounded. He never liked being crowded. It happened at Basel,” Ahmed says, referring to the Swiss club Salah moved to from Egypt at the age of 19 in 2012.

“He doesn’t even live in the city,” exclaims Nagy, the Egyptian doctor, who sees this as another sign of Salah’s alienation from those who adore him, those who struggle to pay for season tickets at Anfield and who will never earn £1m in their lifetime, let alone a week.

In response, Ahmed references Cristiano Ronaldo, who, during his second spell at Manchester United, gave an incendiary interview to Piers Morgan in which he said he didn’t respect manager Erik ten Hag in 2022. 

“He was right in what he said,” Ahmed says. Ronaldo would end up moving to Saudi Arabia, where he still plays, aged 40.

“I hate Cristiano Ronaldo,” Nagy replies. “I hate what he represents in the world.”

While Nagy says that Salah, like Ronaldo, has become a symbol of capitalism and its excesses, Ahmed argues that Liverpool “is sacrificing their legend because of capitalism”. Salah, like Ronaldo, could move to Saudi Arabia, or to Major League Soccer in the US.

 “Salah costs Liverpool the most,” Ahmed says. “They don’t care about the emotional capital he brings to the city. We Egyptians are kind of emotional… Salah thought he would have this emotional weight, he thought he would have emotional capital.”

As they drink their tea, both men acknowledge that their argument, which by now has lasted for two hours, is representative of how Salah now divides opinion. 

“There used to be more of a unified view of him in Egypt,” Nagy, who is from the city of Minya in Upper Egypt, says. “He was the poor kid who took the microbus to training - and that journey was a long one.”

Simon Hughes, a journalist based on Merseyside, took that famous 120-km journey from the Nile Delta town of Nagrig to Cairo when he was writing his biography, Chasing Salah.

“I described the microbus as a sardine can on wheels. It was brutal. Very uncomfortable,” he tells MEE. “I realised after that I was writing as someone over the age of 30. When Salah did that journey, it must have been exciting, daunting, lonely.”

Born in 1992, Salah’s career has been shaped by those humble beginnings in the Nile Delta and by his country’s politics. The neoliberal economic policies pursued by Hosni Mubarak’s government in the 90s and approved by the IMF and World Bank were hard on families like Salah’s, and the political repression was severe. 

As the century turned, the Palestinian intifada of September 2000 prompted tens of thousands of Egyptians to take to the streets. In December 2006, in the Nile Delta city of El Mahalla El Kubra, not far from where Salah grew up, workers at the biggest textile mill in the Middle East went on strike. 

The climate of fear was being challenged, and the road to the 2011 revolution was being paved. That revolution was ultimately undone, and, in its midst, Egyptian football was shut down following the Port Said massacre of February 2012, an action that prompted Salah’s move to Europe months later.

“I think in the West we overlook the impact of Salah being the most famous person Egypt has produced during a time when the country went through a revolution,” Hughes says. “He has to play a careful game because of the status he has in Egypt. He is used to co-existing with powerful institutions.”

Taking care of business

Key to this balancing act, and more particularly to Salah’s brand and his various business interests, is Ramy Abbas Issa, who has almost 200,000 followers on X, where he quotes Donald Trump, praises Arne Slot and takes influencers to task. 

As Hughes details in his book, Salah met Abbas in 2015 on the day he left Chelsea, following an unsuccessful spell at the London club. 

Abbas, who grew up a Catholic in Colombia with a Lebanese father, was working on the image rights of Colombian winger Juan Cuadrado. Cuadrado was coming to Chelsea from Fiorentina. Salah was going the other way, on loan.

Abbas, a lawyer by profession, speaks Arabic and English and was able to help Salah during the day’s negotiations. 

In the evening, Abbas was going to dinner with Cuadrado when Salah spotted him across the hotel lobby. Salah asked Abbas to come over and have a look at the contract Fiorentina had presented him with. It said he’d have to move to the Italian club permanently, but Salah, backing himself to be successful and find a bigger club, didn’t want that.

Abbas got out his Blackberry and wrote up a contract for Salah. Later, Fiorentina brought a legal case against the two men. They won. Abbas is now closer to Salah than anyone other than his family.

“You should think of them as business partners,” Hughes says of Salah and Abbas. “Salah is the football side. Abbas runs the business. They are in touch every day and consult each other over everything.”

“It’s one of the most successful relationships in sport. It’s quite unconventional, not like a standard player-agent relationship. Abbas understood that Salah wanted attention.” 

The two men look to Lionel Messi, Argentina’s World Cup-winning captain, as the benchmark for where Salah should be. Hughes believes that, despite having had legendary players like John Barnes, Steven Gerrard and Kenny Dalglish, Liverpool has never had a player like Salah, who “represents a whole swathe of the world”, and is almost as famous as the club itself.

Now, there is an image rights outfit called Mohamed Salah Marketing Company based in the Cayman Islands and Salah, who owns property in the UAE, is listed as a director of three different companies in the UK, including a real estate venture.

The Egyptian has deals and partnerships with Adidas, Pepsi, Vodafone, DHL, Uber, Oppo, the Bank of Alexandria and real estate company Mountain View. 

Anger at Salah’s Gaza silence

This raft of business interests is seen by some as being Salah’s priority now, stopping him from speaking out on politically charged subjects, including Israel and Palestine. 

 “He’s been really neutral in the last few years,” says Kelwick, the imam. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he had been told to tone it down… I think he’s taken a decision not to be involved in politics.”

In May 2021, with Israel bombarding Gaza and pushing to evict Palestinian families in the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, Salah tweeted “enough is enough” and called for an end to the violence, but did not mention Israel.

Just over a week after the Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023 and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza, Salah made a significant donation to the Egyptian Red Crescent and posted a pained, grainy video to social media in which he said that “humanity must prevail”.

“He has been criticised for it and rightly so,” Ahmed says in the Palm restaurant, of Salah’s response to the Gaza genocide. 

It’s a rare point of agreement with his compatriot Nagy, who, more strident in his criticism, thinks the footballer is prioritising his brand and wonders if Salah would really suffer much of a fallout if he were to be more clearly political.

“Sometimes,” the doctor says, “you just think: what are they going to do to you if you speak out? Will it really be that bad?”

Kelwick is less critical.

“I think our community can be very harsh in its demands sometimes,” he says. “You have to look at the bigger picture. But I do get the feeling Salah is holding back.”

Fans: ‘We love him for what he is’

At Anfield, before, during and after the game against Brighton, the love Liverpool fans feel for Salah is clear.

Barry Clements, an Everton fan, has been selling Liverpool scarves and other paraphernalia in the shadow of Liverpool’s ground for 30 years. “I’ve sold two Salah scarves today,” he says, which doesn’t seem too bad. “It’s been a struggle this season after the highs of last season. But that’s also the economy. People don’t have the money.”

Like Clements, Peter, a Liverpool fan, thinks Salah has “thrown his dummy out of the pram”, acting like a spoilt superstar rather than a grown-up man with teammates. 

But he also thinks it’s a case of “social media gone daft”, with a long line of ex-footballers queuing up to weigh in on the matter.

This becomes a spectacle in and of itself, what Peter calls a “good cop, bad cop” routine whose purpose is to keep people engaging with clips and content.

Peter’s friend Phil, another Liverpudlian in his fifties, thinks Salah is having a tantrum and that his behaviour is tone deaf at a time when most fans are struggling to afford to go to Anfield, but he still thinks “he’s a god”. 

“We love him for what he is,” Phil says about Salah the Egyptian, the Muslim, the Arab. “In this city, we accept you for who you are,” adding that Salah has helped bring Liverpool’s Muslim and non-Muslim communities together.

“He needs to be given the respect he deserves,” says Ryan, 17, who has left school and wants to be a football coach. Most of Ryan’s life as a Liverpool fan has been shaped by Salah, the success he drove, the goals and assists he brought to the side.

“He’s proved it doesn’t matter where you’re from,” Ryan says. His friend Nick, 18, says their friendship group is split on the issue, but the Egyptian’s iconic status in the eyes of Liverpool fans seems assured. 

“He’s one of the greatest players of our era,” Ryan says. “He’s an icon. He has dreamed big. What’s the point of being here if we aren’t going to dream big? Salah showed us that.”

Main picture: Liverpool's Mohamed Salah applauds fans after the match against Brighton on 13 December 2025 (Reuters)