Liverpool learned their lesson with Mohamed Salah after boardroom split and £11m transfer regret

Mohamed Salah has gone on to become a player who will forever be remembered in Liverpool folklore - but it could have been very different.

Having signed from Roma for a fee that could reach £34.3m in the summer of 2017, Salah was arriving on Merseyside for his second stint in England.

This wasn’t the first time that the Egyptian had signed for a Premier League club, and he was determined to prove a point.

Before his days of hearing the Kop sing his name, Salah had a spell in London with Chelsea.

On this day (January 26) in 2014, Salah completed an £11m move to Chelsea from Basel.

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Salah had spent two years at the Swiss club, where he scored nine goals in 47 appearances, before moving to Stamford Bridge.

"I'm very happy to sign for Chelsea. I hope I can make the Chelsea supporters happy and have a good career at the club for many years," said Salah, at the time of his arrival in the English capital.

Liverpool were also interested in signing Salah at the time - but chief executive Ian Ayre and manager Brendan Rodgers had slightly different takes on how it played out, with hints of a difference of opinion at boardroom level.

Ayre said in 2014: "We haven't been held back from concluding a deal, it would be wrong to say that. The player decided he didn't want to come to Liverpool.

"We know what the value of the player is and how far we were prepared to go. That is something myself, Brendan and the others involved in the process discuss openly. We won't overpay. In every transfer window you win some and lose some."

While Rodgers said: "The club did everything they felt they possibly could to get a deal but it wasn't to be.

"We can identify the players that we want to bring in and we hope we can get them in. If we can the club will do everything possible to match the value of the player.

"If they end up going to another club that is difficult to take. But you can't worry about it, you've just got to keep looking forward."

Asked how the Reds decided on their valuation of Salah, Rodgers made a telling admission: "That's for the money guys to say that.

"It's the construction of the whole deal, not only with the player and the agent but also Basel as a football club.

"It was deemed in this case that we couldn't do a deal and Chelsea could. So the boy has gone there."

Ayre eventually left Liverpool in February 2017, and is now the chief executive of Major League Soccer outfit Nashville SC.

The former Reds chief was long gone from Anfield by the time that Salah eventually became a Liverpool player, with the Egyptian arriving five months later.

Salah’s time at Chelsea was largely uneventful. His 19 appearances saw him score just two goals, which to put into context is half of the tally he got for Liverpool in their 5-1 win over Watford in March 2018.

He signed a five-and-a-half year deal with Chelsea that January, but he would only go on to fulfil less than half of that.

Just a year after signing for Chelsea, Salah was shipped out on loan to Fiorentina due to a lack of game time.

Despite Salah not playing much for Chelsea, it was a surprise to his team-mates. Filipe Luis admitted years later that he could not believe it when he learned Salah was joining Fiorentina on loan.

"When [Salah] went to Fiorentina, I said: 'Why are you going, Momo? This is Chelsea'," Luis told the Guardian last year.

"And he said: 'I need to play'. I thought: 'This kid's good.'

"He never went for money or to win more; he went to show he could play. In training he was like Messi. Really, like Messi. Ask anyone."

It proved to be a wise decision for Salah, where he scored nine goals in 26 appearances and caught the attention of another club in Italy.

Roma came in and signed the Egyptian on loan in September 2015, which led to FIFA receiving an official complaint about Chelsea from Fiorentina for an alleged breach of contract.

In June 2016, Chelsea were cleared of any wrongdoing, and then two months later they sold Salah to Roma on a permanent deal for a reported fee worth €15m.

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The manager who first brought Salah to England was Jose Mourinho, who has often got criticised for not playing Salah and eventually letting him leave for Italy.

It was actually Antonio Conte who was Chelsea boss when Salah signed a permanent deal with Roma, but Mourinho was in charge when he first loaned out the winger to Fiorentina.

Back in 2019, Mourinho attempted to clear up why he let Salah go and what it was about the forward that made him want to beat Liverpool to his signature in 2014.

"For a start people try to identify me as the coach that sold Salah. I am the coach that bought Salah. It’s completely the wrong idea," Mourinho told beIN Sports.

"I played against Basel in the Champions League. Salah was a kid at Basel. When I play against a certain team I analyse a team and players for quite a long time.

"And I fell in love with that kid. I bought the kid. I pushed the club to buy him and at the time we already had fantastic attacking players— [Eden] Hazard, Willian, we had top talent there.

"But I told them to buy that kid. He was more a winger coming inside than a striker. He was just a lost kid in London. He was a lost kid in a new world.

"We wanted to work him, to become better and better and better. But he was more of the idea of wanting to play and not wait.

"So we decided to put him on loan, in a culture I knew well. Italy. Tactical football. Physical football. A good place to play."

Despite not signing Salah in 2014, it took Liverpool a new sporting director in the form of Michael Edwards, a new manager in Jurgen Klopp, and three-and-a-half years to finally make their move to bring the forward to Anfield.

Nearly five years later, 229 appearances, 148 goals and four major trophies, Salah has written himself into Liverpool legend and become a big transfer regret for Chelsea.