Success has a thousand fathers, while failure is an orphan. Liverpool forward Mo Salah is having such a breakout 2017-18 season that he’s truly taking the entire football world by storm. The PFA Player of the Year has thrust himself into the Ballon d’Or conversation, as he might just be the best player in the world not named Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo right now.
Salah is just four goals away from breaking the Liverpool record for single season goals, and his current form is so elite that his former clubs are finding themselves having to explain why they let him go.
The Mo Salah story is one with many twists and turns, as he’s played for six different clubs since his senior career began in 2010.
AS Roma’s Director explained on Tuesday that his club badly needed the money in order to balance the books in June, so they had no choice but to let him go. Manchester United manager Jose Mourinho coached him at Chelsea, from 2014-16, and he blames Stamford Bridge for letting Salah leave.
Mourinho took credit for bringing the Egyptian to Chelsea, and blamed the club as the responsible party for jettisoning him.
“It is the first time that I am going to say this, but it is another injustice that has been talked about me,” Mourinho told ESPN.
“People say that I was the one that sold Salah and it is the opposite. I bought Salah.”
“It is the opposite. I was the one that bought Salah. I was the one that told Chelsea to buy Salah. It was with me in charge that Salah came to Chelsea. But he came as a young kid, physically he was not ready, mentally he was not ready, socially and culturally he was lost and everything was tough for him.”
“We decided to put him on loan and he asked for that as well. He wanted to play more minutes, to mature, he wanted to go and we sent him on loan to Fiorentina, and at Fiorentina he started to mature. Chelsea decided to sell him, OK?”
“And when they say that I was the one that sold him it is a lie. I bought him. I agreed to send him on loan, I thought it was necessary, I thought that Chelsea had wingers… Some of them are still there like Willian, [Eden] Hazard and all those players already in a different level.”
“So the decision to send him on loan was a decision we made collectively, but after that, the decision to sell him and to use that money to buy another player wasn’t mine.
“But even if it was, in football we make mistakes a lot of times, so many times some players develop in way we were not expecting, some other don’t reach another level like we thought they would, so I don’t even think this is a mistake, it is just part of the job.”
“But effectively I did buy Salah, I didn’t sell Salah, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he is a fantastic player, and I am really happy for everything that is happening for him and especially because he scores against everyone and he didn’t score against us in two games.”
Mourinho/Chelsea bought Salah from FC Basel for €16.5 million in January 2014. After being loaned to Fiorentina the following winter, and he was then sold to Roma one year later.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net and TheBank.News, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com, currently contributes regularly to WGN CLTV and the Tribune company’s blogging community Chicago Now.
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