Mohamed Salah Leaves Liverpool to Sign for Trabzonspor on a Free Transfer

Mohamed Salah is set to join Turkish side Trabzonspor on a free transfer after mutually agreeing to end his Liverpool contract a year early. The move brings a nine-year spell at Anfield to a close, one that delivered eight major trophies and turned Salah into one of the Premier League’s most feared forwards.

Salah had signed a contract extension in April 2025, but a difficult campaign that followed changed everything. He was dropped at points last season and fell out publicly with then-Liverpool head coach Arne Slot, a breakdown that set the stage for an early exit few would have predicted twelve months ago.

A Contract Cut Short

Rather than see out the remaining year of his deal on the bench or in a reduced role, Salah and Liverpool agreed to part ways now, with the 34-year-old free to negotiate his next move without a transfer fee changing hands. It is a quiet way for a relationship this significant to end, with no fee, no auction among Europe’s biggest clubs, just a mutual agreement to terminate.

He gave a candid interview after being dropped last season, a moment that hinted at the strain building between player and head coach long before the exit became official. What followed was a slow unwinding of a relationship that had defined an era of Liverpool football, and it ends now with Salah heading for Turkey rather than a rival Premier League club or a return to Italy, where he first made his name at Chelsea’s expense.

How It Began

Liverpool had an initial £28m offer rejected before completing the signing of Salah from Roma in the summer of 2017, a deal that eventually rose to £34.3m on a five-year contract. It was a fee just short of the £35m Liverpool paid Newcastle for Andy Carroll back in 2011, and few at the time expected it to become one of the great pieces of transfer business in the club’s history.

The impact was immediate. Salah scored 32 goals in his first season at Anfield to win the Premier League Golden Boot, setting a tone he would sustain for the best part of a decade and forcing his way into a Liverpool front three that reached the Champions League final that same season.

Nine Years of Numbers

Salah leaves Liverpool as the club’s third-highest goalscorer, with 257 goals in 442 appearances across all competitions. Only two players in Liverpool’s history have scored more, a mark of how completely he rewrote what a modern Liverpool forward could produce over the course of a single career.

The trophy count backs up the numbers. Salah won eight major honours in red, headlined by the Champions League in 2019, a final in which he opened the scoring from the penalty spot in a 2-0 win over Tottenham Hotspur in Madrid. He added four Premier League Golden Boots along the way, a tally that puts him level with Thierry Henry among the competition’s most prolific single-season scorers, won in 2017/18, 2018/19, 2021/22 and as recently as 2024/25.

Those numbers are why his exit is such a shock beyond Anfield. A player who was still winning Golden Boots twelve months ago is walking away from the Premier League for a Turkish Süper Lig club, and doing so for reasons that have as much to do with a fractured relationship with his head coach as with football itself.

The Verdict From Those Who Know Him Best

Jurgen Klopp, the manager who signed Salah and oversaw the majority of his trophies at Anfield, described him as an all-time great when news of his eventual departure first broke. “He’s right up there,” Klopp said. “I cannot compare with others really, only with the people and players I worked together with. But in my time, and since I’m really following or working for Liverpool, he’s definitely up there with the greatest. But I don’t have to say that because you read the numbers, you know already there’s something special.”

Klopp went further on the standards Salah set across nine years on Merseyside. “The numbers he produced, the standards he set, I think some of them, if not all, will stay unmatched. In this modern Premier League era, definitely, because it’s just ridiculous to do that,” he said. “He helped the team to be very, very successful. He was successful himself, which is rare in this sport, but as a striker you have to take criticism. To deal with all that and to stay by yourself, to stay yourself, is really tricky, and he did that in exceptional ways. He’s one of the best professionals I’ve ever met, one of the best people I’ve ever met.”

Team-mate Andy Robertson, who joined Liverpool the same summer as Salah in 2017, backed his friend’s decision to move on while placing him just behind Sir Kenny Dalglish in the club’s pantheon. “I would say Kenny probably pips him to that and I tell him that most days. For me, Kenny’s the greatest player of all time for Scotland and he’s the greatest player of all time for Liverpool,” Robertson said. “Behind that, you have three or four players that come into conversation of who’s there and Mo Salah definitely comes into that conversation. It’s just an absolute credit to him to be in even the conversation with Kenny Dalglish, Steven Gerrard, Ian Rush, people like that.”

Robertson added that the send-off Salah receives in his final weeks will reflect what he built at the club. “It’ll be sad, obviously, the next couple of weeks of his farewell, but he’ll get the send-off he deserves because he’s a Premier League legend, but he’s definitely a Liverpool legend,” he said.

From Anfield’s King to the Süper Lig

Trabzonspor finished third in the Turkish Süper Lig last season, a result that has earned them a place in the Europa League playoff round this campaign. Salah walks into a club with continental football to look forward to immediately, though the level is a considerable step down from Champions League nights at Anfield.

Saudi Arabia had long been considered his most probable destination whenever a Liverpool exit did arrive. Clubs there have circled Salah for years, and Liverpool once turned down a £150m offer from Al Ittihad for him, a deal rejected less than three years ago at the peak of his powers. That interest never fully disappeared, and it resurfaced when Salah gave his bombshell interview after being dropped last season, a moment widely read as him opening the door to a move away from Merseyside.

Instead, he has chosen Turkey. It is not the destination most inside the game expected, and it raises immediate questions about what took him there instead of the Gulf.

Trabzonspor are not a club short of history, though they are unfamiliar territory for a player of Salah’s stature. Founded in 1967, they joined the Turkish top flight in 1974 and have never been relegated since. They broke Istanbul’s grip on the Turkish game in the late 1970s and early 1980s, winning six league titles by 1984, and added a seventh in 2021/22 to end a wait of nearly four decades for the championship. They play their home matches at the Senol Gunes Stadium on the Black Sea coast, a modern stadium that replaced their old Huseyin Avni Aker ground in 2016.

Why Trabzonspor and Not Saudi Arabia

Former Premier League defender John Curtis, speaking on Sky Sports News’ Transfer Show, pointed first to the finances. “The obvious one is the money, I’m sure. I think it’s rumoured to be 17m a year or something like that,” he said. “So you know that translates to a little bit less maybe than he was earning at Liverpool, and probably significantly less than he could have got at or in Saudi Arabia.”

Curtis also raised the sporting reality Salah now faces, leaving a Liverpool dressing room built around some of the best players in Europe for a Trabzonspor squad that will ask different questions of him. “It’s very easy to play with top players. So, is this a step down? Obviously, those players are very good players, but most Salah is used to working with the very best, and that impacts you as a player. So, again, it becomes a little bit of a shock,” he said.

That adjustment, more than the football itself, could end up defining how Salah’s spell in Turkey is remembered. He arrives as by far the biggest name in the Süper Lig, a nine-year Liverpool institution walking into a dressing room and a league that will look to him for the kind of moments Anfield came to expect as routine.

What happens next for Salah at club level will play out on a smaller stage than the one he leaves behind. But for a player who redefined what an Egyptian forward could achieve in English football, the numbers he takes with him, the Golden Boots, the Champions League final penalty, the 257 goals, are not going anywhere. Only Alan Shearer, Harry Kane and Wayne Rooney have scored more Premier League goals than Salah in the competition’s history, a list that places him above every other player to have worn a Liverpool shirt.

Trabzonspor gets a nine-year Liverpool legend who arrives on the back of a Golden Boot-winning season rather than a player in decline. What Liverpool gets now is the job of replacing him, and the search for the club’s next Egyptian King, or its next number in that forward line, begins the moment his move to the Black Sea coast is confirmed.