By Rory Smith
Nov 29, 2024

For almost a decade, he has been one of the brightest stars in the Premier League’s glittering firmament. He ranks as quite possibly the finest player of his generation; he has certainly been the most creative, the most decisive. He has, more often than not, been the league’s defining figure. And yet he is just a few months from being allowed to walk away for nothing.

His most recent contract, the one that is likely the richest English football has ever seen, expires in June. His club does not seem to be in any hurry to arrange a new one. Currently, it would appear that Kevin De Bruyne is more out than in.

He is not the only one. Where De Bruyne has been notably phlegmatic about the absence of talks over a prospective new deal at Manchester City — “I’m not worried,” he said this week, insisting he had put all thought of his future “to the side” as he recuperated from injury — Mohamed Salah has taken a different tack with Liverpool.

His approach has been commendably multi-platform; if he doesn’t sign a new contract, he could well have a career in B2B sales. His first intervention on the subject, in September, was delivered live on television. He moved to social media for the second, after victory against Brighton; the third came via an unusual appearance in front of the written media huddled in a car park outside St. Mary’s.

All three have created a sense of urgency around Salah’s future that starkly contrasts De Bruyne’s relative equanimity. Perhaps the circumstances in which their clubs find themselves have contributed to that, too. Manchester City have, in these past few weeks, been distracted by far more pressing matters. The few clouds that might concern Liverpool hang, distant, on the horizon.

De Bruyne, right, playing for City last season (Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)

For all the cosmetic differences, the situations share a common core. Football has a curious ability to produce coincidences that look like intelligent design. De Bruyne and Salah share a Premier League origin story: spotted, signed and prematurely discarded by Chelsea, every honour in their remarkable careers acting as a tacit rebuke to Jose Mourinho.

Their arcs may converge, once more, at their end. Salah is 32, De Bruyne a year older. They are among the highest-paid players in the league. When fit, both possess a talent that remains undimmed. Both retain the capacity to bend games — and possibly seasons — to their will. Neither has yet shown any material signs of imminent decline.

But Salah and De Bruyne are only human. Sooner or later, they will begin to fade. That leaves their clubs in a quandary. Ushering a modern icon out of the door is unfathomable, but Liverpool and Manchester City know that, at some point, the sun is going to set. And they do not want to find themselves paying £15million ($19m) a year for the privilege of watching it happen.

Football has always struggled with the conundrum of what to do with players as they reach their twilight years. In his book How To Win The Premier League, Ian Graham, Liverpool’s former director of research, notes that players’ salaries tend to peak at 29 years old. By the time they reach Salah and De Bruyne’s age, they are largely at their peak earning potential.

The problem, of course, is that performance tends to track in the opposite direction. Ageing is an individual thing; how long a player might last is defined by a set of factors so bespoke that it is intensely difficult to predict. Wayne Rooney played his last Champions League game in 2016. Luka Modric played his most recent Champions League game on Wednesday. Modric is just one month older than Rooney.

Most clubs, though, hew to the maxim often — and possibly apocryphally — ascribed to Bob Paisley, that it is better for “players’ legs to go on someone else’s watch”.

Occasionally, that manifests in what is probably closer to guidelines than actual rules. In 2009, Manchester United decided they would no longer commit substantial fees for players over 26. This being United, it did not last. In his latter years at Arsenal, Arsene Wenger determined he would only offer one-year contract extensions to players over 32. Except when he didn’t.

Even those clubs who do not feel the need to spell it out tend to prioritise youth, to sign players with at least some consideration of how much value they might retain as they, and their contracts, mature.

Chelsea have spent eye-watering amounts of money building the youngest squad in the Premier League in the past two years: only one of the players signed under the club’s current owners was older than 25 and that was the free transfer of Tosin Adarabioyo. Liverpool have paid a fee for a player older than 27 only twice in the last nine years. Tottenham last did so in 2020.

The effect has been pronounced: last season, only 117 players in their thirties played in the Premier League, the lowest figure since 2008. As England’s clubs have become suffused with data, as the game has become faster, as owners have grown smarter, the conclusion has been reached that it is, at heart, a young man’s game.

If this makes sense from a financial perspective, it is less obvious if it is rational from a sporting one. Some researchers have found that, while players over 30 decline physically, they continue to perform their “technical-tactical” functions to the same level and might even improve.

Anecdotally, Karim Benzema, Robert Lewandowski, Olivier Giroud — and, obviously, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi — continued to thrive at the pinnacle of the game well into their mid-, and even late, thirties. Given the advances in nutrition, conditioning and recovery, that should not be a surprise. There is ample visual evidence, after all, that players used to age more quickly.

This, then, is the knot for Liverpool and Manchester City to unpick. Convention says one thing; science might indicate another. Some of that might apply to Salah and De Bruyne, or all of it, or none of it. They are both at the peak of their financial powers; they are likely both past the peak of their physical ones. Quite how far down that particular slope both have travelled is possible to estimate, but not to know for sure.

Liverpool have, at least once before, tried to map out what the autumn of Salah’s career might look like using the same analytical approach that has restored the club to the front rank of European football’s superpowers. It is likely that, as discussions around his new contract have started, they have done so again.

The factors that might have gone into that assessment are not conclusive. He has avoided serious injury for much of his career, but he has always been an explosive sort of player, the kind that wisdom dictates will feel the effects of age more keenly. The relatively slow start to his career — including that fallow period at Chelsea — might help. So, too, his pristine physical shape.

Salah celebrates scoring against Southampton on Sunday (Michael Steele/Getty Images)

But then his time at Liverpool has included several long, gruelling seasons, ones in which he was part of a team playing intense, draining football. Hindsight suggests that many of those who did so alongside him — Georginio Wijnaldum, Roberto Firmino, Jordan Henderson — started to show the wear and tear not long after leaving. There are no answers here, no neat conclusions.

From the outside, of course, it feels as though all of this falls somewhere between obfuscation and irrelevance. “The fans love me and I love the fans,” Salah said in that car park in Southampton. Salah has been pivotal in Liverpool’s blistering start to the season. He is performing, by some metrics, as well as he has ever done. They would, as the signs at Anfield have made clear, pay him whatever he demands. That the club does not take the same view is a source of increasing frustration. Should De Bruyne, starting on Sunday, begin to lift City from their slump, it is fair to assume the Etihad would react in the same way.

There is, though, a duality to all clubs. They are expected to be both vessels of enormous emotion, responding to and at the mercy of the wishes of their fans, and cool-eyed, clear-headed businesses. At times, those two aspects dovetail seamlessly. At others, they act as a source of friction, the irreconcilable tension between the heart and the head.

It would be wrong to say Liverpool’s motives are purely financial. The club had the opportunity to sell Salah last summer, with a year left on his contract, to Saudi Arabia for somewhere in the region of £150million. They chose not to do so. The fact Salah’s agent, Ramy Abbas Issa, is engaged in talks with Liverpool indicates that the club would like him to stay; several of his former team-mates did not even reach that stage, after all.

But there is a calculation to be made, just as there will be for Manchester City once De Bruyne decides that the time is right to discuss his future. When the Belgian signed his last contract, in 2021, he recruited a data analytics company to provide him with concrete evidence of his value to the team. That will not be possible this time; neither he nor City can be sure what sort of veteran he will be. Every player ages. But every player, too, only ages once.

The players, like the fans, are naturally inclined to live in the moment, to assume that tomorrow will look very much like today. The clubs cannot do that. The only thing they know is that offering Salah or De Bruyne a new contract is to go against their better judgment, their unspoken rules, and to invest in decline. What they have to decide is just how much they are prepared to gamble.