Latest news with #MohamedSalah
Arab News
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Arab News
Liverpool forward Mohamed Salah's visit to Japanese temple sparks social media debate among Egyptians
BEIRUT: Photographs of Liverpool striker Mohamed Salah visiting a Buddhist temple in Japan this week — alongside his teammates — have sparked controversy among Egyptians on social media, with some praising Salah's open-mindedness and others having a different opinion. For the latest updates, follow us @ArabNewsSport As part of their summer tour ahead of the Premier League's start next month, Liverpool posted a video on their X handle on Monday about their visit to Eko-in Temple, a Jodo-shu Buddhist temple in Tokyo, for what they described as a 'bespoke meditation session.' Some Arabic news websites posted photos of players, including Salah, sitting cross-legged on the temple's floor while they seemed to be attending a meditation session, which Liverpool said was 'guided by a monk.' A morning of meditation — Liverpool FC (@LFC) July 28, 2025 Some social media users praised Salah for being culturally curious and respecting and accepting of other religions, while others criticized his visit and considered whether — as an icon for millions in the Arab and Muslim world — he should instead have visited an Islamic center or a mosque in Tokyo. Several users commented on X that Salah had represented Egypt and the Egyptians in the best way through showing respect and openness toward other cultures and religions. At the Ekoin Temple in Tokyo, the Reds were guided by a monk in a bespoke meditation session — Liverpool FC (@LFC) July 28, 2025 Others had an opposite viewpoint, saying they would have preferred to have seen Salah visiting a mosque in Tokyo rather than a temple. One group of users — describing the criticism and controversy as 'exaggerated' — said that Liverpool's visit to the temple had no religious significance but rather fell within the tourist and cultural program of a global sports team. According to the club's official website, Liverpool's tour of Japan included friendly matches and cultural activities aimed at strengthening ties with Japanese fans. Eko-in Temple is a popular tourist destination in the Japanese capital, distinguished by its traditional architecture and the meditation sessions held there.
See - Sada Elbalad
19 hours ago
- Entertainment
- See - Sada Elbalad
Mohamed Salah Rivals Messi and Ronaldo on the List of World Football Kings
Amir Haggag The international network "Sportsdunia" has ranked Mohamed Salah among the world's football kings, placing him third behind the world's best duo: Cristiano Ronaldo, captain of the Portugal national team and Saudi club Al-Nassr, who ranked first, and Argentine legend Lionel Messi, star of the American club Inter Miami, who came in second. According to the global network, Mohamed Salah is the king of the Egyptian national team and Liverpool and is an exceptional team leader, engaging in fierce battles on the field to decide the outcome of matches in his team's favor. He has scored 322 goals and assisted 161 others throughout his career. Mohamed Salah surpassed Kevin De Bruyne, the former Manchester City star who recently joined Napoli, Kylian Mbappé, the Real Madrid star, Jude Bellingham, the England national team and Real Madrid player, and Haaland, the Norwegian national team and Manchester City star. Ranking the list of football kings: 1. Cristiano Ronaldo 2. Lionel Messi 3. Mohamed Salah 4. Kevin De Bruyne 5. Kylian Mbappé 6. Jude Bellingham 7. Haaland read more Japan Stun Spain 2-1 to Qualify for World Cup Last 16 World Cup 2022: Get to Know Confirmed Line-ups of Japan and Spain Group E Decider Saudi Arabia Bid Farewell to World Cup after 2-1 Loss to Mexico Tunisia Achieve Historic Win over France but Fail to Qualify Tunisia to Clash against France in World Cup Sports Get to Know Squad of Group D Teams in World Cup Sports Al Ahly Gift EGP 70,000 to Players After Claiming Egyptian Super Cup Title Sports Bencharki Hits First 2 Goals with Al Jazira Since Leaving Zamalek Sports Arsenal Possible Line-up for Nottingham Forest News Israeli-Linked Hadassah Clinic in Moscow Treats Wounded Iranian IRGC Fighters Arts & Culture "Jurassic World Rebirth" Gets Streaming Date News China Launches Largest Ever Aircraft Carrier News Ayat Khaddoura's Final Video Captures Bombardment of Beit Lahia Videos & Features Tragedy Overshadows MC Alger Championship Celebration: One Fan Dead, 11 Injured After Stadium Fall Lifestyle Get to Know 2025 Eid Al Adha Prayer Times in Egypt Business Egyptian Pound Undervalued by 30%, Says Goldman Sachs Arts & Culture South Korean Actress Kang Seo-ha Dies at 31 after Cancer Battle Sports Get to Know 2025 WWE Evolution Results Arts & Culture Lebanese Media: Fayrouz Collapses after Death of Ziad Rahbani
New York Times
21 hours ago
- Business
- New York Times
How Liverpool can afford to buy Alexander Isak even after committing over £500m in two months
Liverpool's largesse this summer has taken plenty aback, not least as it arrives following a dominant domestic showing last season. Having won the Premier League title in Arne Slot's first year in the Anfield dugout, there's been little suggestion of the club resting on their laurels. Wider dominance is the clear and stated aim, with heady transfer spending to go with tying down top goalscorer Mohamed Salah and captain Virgil van Dijk to contract extensions to replace their deals that were going to expire this summer. Advertisement Including appropriate estimated fees and levies, alongside the £25million signing of Giorgi Mamardashvili from Valencia, who officially joined on July 1 after the deal was done last August, Liverpool's spend in the past two months sits north of £300m ($400m). Even in the madcap world of modern-day transfers, that's a huge sum. Using accounting years, only two clubs have previously exceeded that mark in single-season spending: Chelsea, twice, in 2022-23 and 2023-24, and Manchester City in 2017-18. Signing Alexander Isak too would take Liverpool beyond the £400million barrier, a realm only Chelsea have dared venture into. The latter have become almost synonymous with, shall we say, creative thinking; in each of the two seasons referenced, they avoided breaching Premier League profitability and sustainability rules (PSR) through selling assets to fellow companies within the broader ownership group. Liverpool haven't employed such tactics, so there's naturally been plenty of wondering how exactly they can afford to do what they're doing. Their owners at Fenway Sports Group (FSG) have long fielded accusations of frugality during their time at Anfield, pouring in money at a rate well below the level of peers. Across almost 14 years of ownership to the end of May last year, FSG provided £263.6million in funding to the club; Chelsea received £315m from their owners in 2023-24 alone. What's more, much of FSG's funding has been directed toward infrastructure projects, rather than squad improvements. To sign Isak, Liverpool will have to part with the third-highest fee ever paid for a footballer. Newcastle United would like conversations to start at about £150million for their Swedish striker, which might not prove attainable given he wants to leave and the list of realistic suitors is short. Yet even the £120m starting point Liverpool have previously communicated they are willing to make a deal at would only trail Paris Saint-Germain's signings of Neymar and Kylian Mbappe when it comes to football's richest transfers. To understand how Liverpool buying Isak is even a possibility, never mind his most realistic option from this vantage point, requires looking both forwards and backwards, as well as considering PSR and cash limits which, as we'll see, can be very different things. Even before looking at their activity to date, it's worth detailing where Liverpool stood at the onset of the summer. In 2023-24, they recorded a £57.1m pre-tax loss, the worst financial result in the club's history. Yet, as The Athletic detailed in March, the big deficit was an exception: we projected Liverpool would be comfortably profitable last season. Advertisement Premier League PSR is assessed over a rolling three-year period, meaning strong performance in a preceding financial year can set a club up nicely to spend in the following one. As with any club, Liverpool's PSR loss figure is lower than their pre-tax one, as clubs can remove 'allowable' costs such as spending on youth development, or the club's women's team. In Liverpool's case, those allowable costs are sizeable. We estimate they exceed £40m per season. In other words, that £57.1m pre-tax loss was far smaller within Liverpool's PSR calculation. Correspondingly, the pre-tax profit we were already projecting for Liverpool in 2024-25 represents an even greater PSR profit. Across the past two seasons, the club's combined PSR result is expected to be highly profitable — opening the door for them to post a large loss in 2025-26, if they chose to, while still remaining within the rules. Separate to PSR is Liverpool's cash position, which can be an obvious but underreported impediment to a club being active in the transfer market. FSG have long been keen to manage Liverpool sustainably, and that's borne out in the strong cash position the club appears to have entered the summer with. To the end of the 2023-24 season, Liverpool owed a net £69.9m in transfer fees to other clubs, by far the lowest transfer debt of the Premier League's 'big six' and pretty much middling across the division. That figure only fell last season, leaving Liverpool without large historic commitments hampering their ability to spend now. Compare that with Sir Jim Ratcliffe's March lamentation about Manchester United's transfer debt — £271.6m at the end of last season, and even higher now — and you get a sense of how Liverpool are less restrained than others. Completion of works on the Anfield Road End in early 2024 brought an end to a significant period of infrastructure investment, releasing the club from sizeable cash commitments. Further ensuring plenty of cash to be tapped was the extension of a revolving credit facility (RCF) from £200m to £350m in September 2024. At the end of May that year, only £116m of the RCF had been drawn down. All of this is without getting into the fact Liverpool enjoyed record revenues in 2024-25, projected at over £700m, ones which are only expected to grow further this season. Having established Liverpool's strong PSR and cash positions, we can move onto determining just how much they've spent to date. Or, more pertinently, how much they've committed to in total spending. On transfer fees, agent fees and transfer levies, Liverpool's estimated spend on Florian Wirtz, Hugo Ekitike, Milos Kerkez, Jeremie Frimpong and Mamardashvili totals £314m. We don't know the terms of when the various fees will be paid, but it seems a safe bet Liverpool's transfer debt has jumped from lowly beginnings. Advertisement Transfer fees tend to be widely reported at this level, but reliable information on how much players are paid is difficult to come by, and not only because there's often little benefit to the involved parties in disclosing such figures. Clubs increasingly reward players with an array of performance bonuses which, if achieved, can mean the player's actual annual wage strays far from the basic salary which might have leaked out back when they signed. Taking that crevasse-sized caveat into account, we're necessarily limited in how accurately we can project what Liverpool have committed to in terms of paying their new recruits over their respective contracts, all of which run for a minimum of five years. Even so, estimates by The Athletic put the sum committed to those five new signings in excess of £250m over their contracts. Add that to the transfer fees above and we arrive at a commitment from Liverpool this summer to spend well in excess of half a billion pounds on new players. Even for a club with £700m-plus revenues, that's a lot, especially when coupled with a wage bill which only trails Manchester City's in England. As we've detailed, Liverpool have plenty of PSR headroom in 2025-26, and could stomach a big loss if they fancied it. The problem with that tactic is it does require mitigation further down the line. Come the 2027-28 season, the profit of last year falls off Liverpool's calculation. That's without getting into the intricacies of UEFA's squad cost ratio (SCR), a measure which limits the proportion of income clubs can spent on transfer fees, wages and agent costs. Notably, income for SCR purposes includes a club's profit on player sales (albeit a pro-rated version, which we won't get into here). It is player sales which now hold the key to much of Liverpool's financial strategy. Such sales will boost the bottom line in the current season, aiding both domestic and European PSR, as well as provide a cash boost and limit transfer debt from soaring too high. In fact, remarkable as it may seem, player sales in this window could prove enough to offset the in-year impact of Liverpool's huge spending on incomings. They have probably already done so. To understand how that can possibly be the case, consider the sale of Luis Diaz to Bayern Munich. Diaz is to join the German champions for €75m (£65.6m; $87.4m). He arrived on Merseyside three and a half years ago for a fee which eventually saw £43m flow from Liverpool to Porto. That fee was expensed (amortised) across Diaz's five-and-a-half-year contract, meaning his book value at the point of sale equated to roughly 36 per cent (two years out of five and a half) of the total fee spent on him. Advertisement After adding on assumed agent fees and levies, that left Diaz's book value at around £17.5m. Liverpool are selling him for £65.6m, thus crystallising a £48.1m profit — one which they book immediately into their 2025-26 accounts. The same is true of some far simpler sales. Pretty much all of the £30m generated from Jarrell Quansah's move to Bayer Leverkusen last month was also booked immediately as profit, likewise £8.4m received from Real Madrid for Trent Alexander-Arnold and £3m from West Brom for Nat Phillips. A further £10m in profit came from selling Caoimhin Kelleher to Brentford. In all Liverpool have banked an estimated £99.5m profit on player sales already this summer. That £99.5m is just the transfer fees. The wages of those outgoings aren't well-known but will all add up. Alexander-Arnold, for example, earned around £200,000 per week before bonuses, costing Liverpool a minimum £12m per year after employment taxes. While sales are booked immediately, transfer fees are spread across contracts. Liverpool's 31 May accounting date offers a further disconnect, as player contracts run to 30 June, meaning a month's worth of transfer fee at the end of a player's contract will fall into the accounting period ostensibly covering the season after they've left the club. That has the corresponding impact of lowering the immediate hit. Ekitike, announced on 23 July, will see just over 10 months of his fee and wages accounted for in 2025-26; it would have been 11 months if Liverpool's financial year ran to the end of June. It might sound inconsequential, but at the level of fees involved here it makes a difference. On amortisation costs alone, we estimate Liverpool's quintuple of new faces will hit the 2025-26 books to the tune of £56.3m. In other words, on fees, the combined £99.5m in player profits this summer comfortably outstrip this year's amortisation cost stemming from new signings. That ignores wages, and Liverpool are paying big amounts to their new recruits, particularly Ekitike and Wirtz. Yet they've also shifted a chunk off the wage bill, principally through the departures of Alexander-Arnold and Diaz. Exact amounts are unknown but this summer's sales could reasonably total around £25m in annual wages saved. Advertisement The wages added via the new signings easily outweigh that sum but, as we've seen, player sales to date cover the new amortisation costs with over £40m left to play with. Our estimate of the total 2025-26 cost of Liverpool's five new signings, across both fees and wages, is a little over £100m. That's just a smidge more than the player profits Liverpool have generated this summer. Add in the wage savings and, as ludicrous as it may sound, Liverpool's transfer activity has generated a profit in 2025-26. Understand all that and you go a long way to understanding how, at least in the here and now, signing Alexander Isak even for the mooted £150m transfer fee (2025-26 amortisation after assorted costs: £28.6m) and £300,000 per week wage (2025-26 salary cost: £14.8m) wouldn't blow Liverpool's current finances to smithereens. Far from it. Signing Isak would add an estimated £43.4m in costs this year, but by our estimate that would only just tip the impact of this summer's transfer dealings into a position of adding costs comparative to 2024-25. Owing to the timing of his signing, Isak's annual cost would then increase to around £53m from next season. That highlights a rather glaring omission in all this. So far, we've only really considered 2025-26. Sales made this summer have generated £99.5m in profit but will garner precisely nothing next year; meanwhile, the new signings continue to cost the club a huge annual sum. Twelve months of costs for each of their new recruits will hit Liverpool's books in 2026-27, and for several years after. We estimate business to date has loaded £109m onto Liverpool's annual costs — a figure which rises to £162m if Isak is signed on a deal that would ultimately cost Liverpool over £250m across his time at Anfield. Predicting where Liverpool's wider finances will go in the future is a fool's errand, not least those elements linked to on-field performance. But by any stretch, an extra £109m-162m in annual costs, recurring for several years, is a big bill to pay. We outlined our estimation Liverpool's business to date has committed them to well over half a billion in spending over the next five or six years; stick on a further £250m-plus for Isak and you're at a sum in the region of £840m. That's been offset by £99.5m in sales profits so far, alongside whatever wages have departed. There's also the point that, in the case of Diaz, Liverpool benefit from not having to amortise his fee now he's gone (the other departures had negligible amortisation costs). That's around a further £9m saving on last year. All told, outgoings have probably generated income or produced cost savings this coming season totalling £136m, while adding the signing of Isak to existing business would see a total increase in this season's costs of around £144m. In other words, the net impact of the summer's activity would be to add just an extra £8m in costs in 2025-26. That does also ignore any impact from those new contracts handed to Van Dijk and Salah. Those two could become of greater significance to the matters of today in two years' time. Their new contracts expire in 2027 and, while its unknown if they'll stay beyond then, it's a distinct possibility they won't. Given the size of their pay packets, that would provide a significant reduction in Liverpool's wage bill — thus helping to offset the costs this summer's new signings are continuing to incur. Advertisement That's a while off, albeit Liverpool will already be thinking about how they foot the long-term costs they're currently committing themselves to. As we've seen, remarkable as it may appear, this summer's activity so far has actually generated a net profit in the club's 2025-26 financial year. Any more big sales — like, for example, Darwin Nunez — would only further improve the bottom line. The potential problem comes later, when more sales are needed or other measures, like generating higher revenues or cutting costs, have to be undertaken. Liverpool's summer is signing them up to a hefty future commitment, though in the here and now their finances continue to look rosy. That will remain the case even if they take the plunge and make Alexander Isak the most expensive player in English football history.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Sport
- Yahoo
Mohamed Salah Shines in Liverpool Training Ahead of Yokohama Friendly
Egyptian star steals the spotlight with stunning goals in Japan pre-season camp Mohamed Salah Shines in Liverpool Training Ahead of Yokohama Friendly Liverpool's talisman Mohamed Salah's turned heads once again, this time during the Reds pre season training in Japan ahead of their friendly clash against Yokohama F. Marinos. Pre Season Tour Highlights The Merseyside giants are wrapping up their Asia tour having previously suffered 4 - 2 defeat to AC Milan in Hong Kong. They now prepare to face Yokohama Marinos on Wednesday at 10:30PM (GMT) at the Yokohama Stadium. Salah Impresses with Flair & Sharpness Salah was the standout figure in Liverpool's sessions netting series of eye catching goals including headers and backheel finishes , which reflected his full physical & technical readiness for the 2025 /26 season. His performances earned him widespread praise from teammates and coaching staff while fans flooded social media with admiration after the club shared the training highlights on its official platforms.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Silent Rivalry: Mahrez Ignores Salah in Bombshell Interview
Algerian star sparks controversy by snubbing Egypt's Mohamed Salah throughout lengthy TV appearance Silent Rivalry: Mahrez Ignores Salah in Bombshell Interview In revealing one hour interview with CARRE TV, Riyad Mahrez opened up about his incredible football journey from humble beginnings to continental & European triumphs. But the most striking takeaway wasn't what Mahrez said it was who he left out. Salah's Name Missing - Again Despite discussing legends like Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Karim Benzema, the Al Ahli Saudi winger made no mention whatsoever of Mohamed Salah, his longtime African rival. The deliberate omission didn't go unnoticed and has reignited speculation about the frosty dynamics between 2 superstars. Tension Escalates from Media to Pitch The apparent media silence seems to echo Salah's recent interview with Ballon d'or where he too excluded Mahrez when asked about the greatest African player he had seen. Salah praised Didier Drogba & George Weah but made no reference to Mahrez one of Africa's most decorated players of the past decade. Calculated Silence? Observers now suggest that Mahrez's total avoidance of Salah's name was not coincidental. Whether discussing his golden era at Man City, his status among African legends or even the Saudi Pro League project, the Algerian winger never once acknowledged Salah's influence or rivalry even in contexts where it seemed almost unavoidable. A Tactical Media Move? Some insiders wonder whether Mahrez'd requested that Salah's name not be raised during the broadcast an unlikely but not impossible move. Whatever the case, the interview sends clear message: Mahrez chose to respond to Salah's earlier snub with one of his own, colder and more complete.
