Today, Liverpool and Premier League legend Mohamed Salah is officially a Trabzonspor player, joining last season’s third-place Turkish Super Lig side ahead of a season that will see them playing in the Europa League while trying to close the gap on Galatasaray and Fenerbahce domestically.
This wasn’t perhaps the plan. Wasn’t the expected outcome. After a difficult 2025-26 season for Mohamed Salah as well as for Liverpool, though, expectations that the 34-year-old Egyptian winger would play out a final
season at Anfield before perhaps taking a last payday in MLS or the Saudi league went out the window.
With everything seemingly going wrong at Liverpool and head coach Arne Slot heading towards the exit door, Salah and the club agreed to terminate the final year of his contract with the understanding he would pick a club outside of England. That club was still expected to be in a top European league.
A return to Roma for a time was mooted and seemed the romantic option, but then that chatter faded and talk of a move to MLS or Saudi this summer came to the fore before it to faded and the Turkish Super Lig took centre stage. Besiktas, for a time, seemed a lock only for Salah’s agent and the club to hit an impasse.
Now, instead, it’s Trabzonspor, a club based in the small city of Trabzon on the Black Sea, 1,000km east of Istanbul. Salah will spend the next two years there if all goes to plan, signing a deal worth €17M per season including his base wages and the signing-on fee as well as 20% of jersey sales.
It’s not where anyone will have expected Salah to end up, not even as recently as a month ago when he was playing for Egypt at the World Cup and showing he still had the ability to influence games at a high level. It’s where he is now, though, and hopefully it’s a move that works out well for him and his family.
