Liverpool's Salah and Van Dijk Deals: A £39m Lesson in Contract Excess

While Liverpool grapple with their faltering Premier League title push, one story has loomed largest over Anfield: what to do about three ageing stars heading toward free agency. Retaining two of them seemed a victory lap at the time. The two who stayed—Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk—had evolved into genuine club icons since arriving in 2017 and 2018.

Yet by the time pen hit paper on fresh terms, both men had crossed into their thirties. Liverpool responded by handing out two of the most eye-watering contracts the Premier League has ever seen. Salah pockets £400,000 weekly plus £100,000 in bonuses, whilst Van Dijk banks £350,000 a week with another £50,000 available. Only Erling Haaland earns more—the very man who netted a hat-trick past them in the FA Cup quarter-final.

The cruel irony? Neither remotely justifies the outlay.

Salah and the club have already agreed to part ways come summer, almost certainly ending what will prove his least productive season in a red shirt. The exit could have happened in January, truth be told. Van Dijk has twelve months remaining, though a penalty conceded against City hardly screams redemption arc for a defender commanding top-tier wages.

The Short-Term Gamble

Here's the uncomfortable question: did Liverpool fundamentally miscalculate?

When silverware seemed assured, keeping two such pivotal performers looked shrewd. But those astronomical salaries reek of short-termism—a failure to acknowledge that players in their thirties don't improve with age. Liverpool now faces the reckoning.

This isn't solely on Salah and Van Dijk. Teammates have similarly dipped in form. New recruits haven't delivered. The manager hasn't cracked the tactical code. Yet the two renewals stand as monuments to poor planning, evoking uncomfortable parallels with Arsenal's Mesut Ozil and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang situations. Those two were world-class once; Arsenal eventually had to tear up the deals and move them on.

The Numbers Tell the Story

Salah departs for nothing this summer—nearly three years after Liverpool rejected a £150m offer from Al-Ittihad. Over his final contract year, he'll have cost the club more than £20m in wages alone. Van Dijk? Another £18m-plus spent on a defender who hasn't remotely delivered value. Dominik Szoboszlai, their standout performer this campaign, costs roughly a third of what Van Dijk earns.

That's a £39m investment in a disastrous double act—the sort of decision-making you'd expect from Manchester United's boardroom, not Liverpool's traditionally sharper operators.

Bigger financial disasters exist in football's history books. Expensive signings have flopped. Injury-prone heavyweights have drained coffers. But Liverpool's handling of Salah and Van Dijk—particularly before a summer when they smashed their transfer record twice—warrants serious scrutiny. The renewals themselves weren't inherently wrong; the terms? Absolutely were. That's a schoolboy error, and it's cost them dearly.