They are not the numbers that matter, those that will define a Liverpool legacy, but quietly filed in March were the figures that helped illustrate Mohamed Salah’s value in a different light.
The annual accounts for Salah UK Commercial Limited, the company responsible for handling a slice of the forward’s off-field income in the country he has called home since 2017, presented a snapshot of snowballing wealth.
Just over £25million ($32m) now sits on the balance sheet of a UK-registered private company where Salah is the only listed director, up from the £19.8m 12 months earlier — a year-on-year bump of more than £5m after taxes.
It is a fraction of the wages earned by Salah at Liverpool — estimated to be between £18m and £21m gross each year since a renegotiated contract made him the club’s highest-paid player in 2022 — but laid bare in those returns is a glimpse of the Egyptian’s enduring commercial appeal.
Brand Salah is big business.
The player’s long-time advisor and lawyer, Ramy Abbas Issa, suggested last year that image rights and commercial activities top up Salah’s combined earnings to somewhere close to £1m a week. That assessment, delivered in a Harvard Business School study, would support the theory the Egyptian has reached that point in his career where there is more money to be made off the pitch than for what he does on it.
Salah’s commercial earnings in the UK are the tip of the iceberg for the Arab world’s most recognisable sportsman. A longstanding deal with boot suppliers Adidas heads up a list of partnerships that has included Pepsi, Vodafone, DHL, Uber, Oppo, the Bank of Alexandria and real estate company Mountain View.
Mohamed Salah is one of the global faces of Adidas (Nicola Sua – AMA/Getty Images)
The big brands have flocked to Salah in recent years and so have the yields. Abbas said every commercial deal is typically worth between £3.5m and £6m a year to his client. An optimistic take perhaps but no one in the industry would challenge the bottom end of that bracket.
All indicators point to Salah being the most commercially valuable footballer in the Premier League; the name and face with the greatest international appeal.
“Worldwide, I’d say he’s as big as anyone after Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Neymar,” says Ehsen Shah, founder and chief executive of sports marketing experts B-Engaged.
”He’s been at the top of the game for a few years and he’s proven it at a top club. It’s not been the same success with the Egyptian national team, but he’s won the Champions League and the Premier League. You’ve got Jude Bellingham up and coming but Salah would be fourth on the list for now.”
The most commercially powerful player in the Premier League?
“More than likely he is, yes,” says Dan Haddad, head of commercial strategy at Octagon, a sports, music and entertainment agency.
“That is likely a symptom of Manchester United not having consistent performance and without any player holding particular global relevance. You could only really say that Erling Haaland has the potential to start to rival Salah.
“He probably will because he’s got similar characteristics. He’s very recognisable, he’s involved in the big moments. He’s on an upward trajectory, corresponding with Manchester City’s success in the Champions League last season.
“Virgil van Dijk is another one you’ve really started to notice in recent years, becoming front and centre for different campaigns for brands — but Salah is still probably the number one player in terms of marketability in the Premier League.”
Salah is undeniably a modern Liverpool icon. Last season was punctuated by the Africa Cup of Nations and minor injuries, and will not go down as one of his best at Anfield, but his header in Liverpool’s 4-2 win at home to Tottenham Hotspur was his 211th goal in all competitions since joining from Roma for £36m.
Seven fruitful seasons with Liverpool have established Salah among the elite and increasingly made him a golden ticket to marketing executives. He is the supreme talent with a happy face, the family man who began with nothing in his home town of Nagrig, Egypt, and came to have everything.
His story does not need much selling and plenty queue up to invest in Salah. In the Middle East and north Africa, he is the face of a thousand billboards. In 2022, he was a cover star for the fashion magazine GQ. There are regular appearances in TV adverts and Salah was filming another, this time for Pepsi, in Liverpool three months ago.
Mohamed Salah’s image was used to sell mobile phones, among other things, at the 2022 World Cup (Matthew Ashton – AMA/Getty Images)
“If you look at the regions he can tap into through language and culture, it’s a market no one else can really do,” says Shah. “He almost has a monopoly. Not only does he have North Africa, he’s got the entire Middle East.
“Hence why the Saudis pushed so hard to get him (to move to the Saudi Pro League last summer). He’s that person who has that clout in the market.
“Any of these big brands needing credibility or cut-through in marketing, you put him as the face. It’s the attention grab, the stop of the scroll (on social media). You see the face you recognise and ask: ‘What’s he doing?’ It’s an ability to stop someone for that second longer than you might if you were just using someone you might not recognise. Salah gives you that guarantee in that part of the world.”
The Harvard Business School study that Salah and Abbas endorsed before its publication last September was a rare window into the mechanics of a contract renewal at the highest level.
There was an acceptance Salah came close to turning down Liverpool in the summer of 2022, with discussions said to have “broken down entirely” before an agreement was eventually reached on a new three-year deal that will expire next summer.
Abbas openly presented numbers, too. Big ones. He said expectations were for Salah to earn “somewhere between €54m (£46.3m, $58.8m) and €62m per year” from wages and image rights during his contract with Liverpool.
The most recent figures filed at Companies House, the public record of UK-based businesses, account only for Salah’s commercial activities in his adopted home. In what has become standard practice for elite sportsmen, image rights payments go to a company rather than the individual, thus benefitting from lower taxes than the 45 per cent taken on earnings. Salah UK Commercial Limited, it must be stressed, still paid £2.3m in corporation tax during its most recent accounting period.
It is safe to assume the accounts filed in March tell only part of Salah’s story as a commercial behemoth. An unscientific but telling measure of his standing comes through a social media following running close to 100million people.
As well as more than 35million followers on X and Facebook, he can boast more than 63million on Instagram. That is a fraction of the 628million followers built up by Ronaldo, the most popular individual on the platform, but Salah comfortably boasts the biggest following of any Premier League player, with Haaland next best on 39 million.
Not only does that illustrate Salah’s global appeal but it also underlines why brands are drawn his way. He gives them kudos and credibility. Salah’s most recent Vodafone advert posted on his Instagram account in January was liked more than 510,000 times.
Salah during Liverpool’s last game of the season (Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)
Vodafone Egypt, the telecoms giant, has been in Salah’s corner since 2017. It has done countless TV ads together and, in one publicity stunt, offered customers 11 minutes of free domestic talk time in Egypt for every goal Salah scored in the closing weeks of the 2017-18 season.
So tight is the partnership with Vodafone that Salah caused a diplomatic row when discovering his image had been plastered on the side of a plane due to fly the Egypt national team to the 2018 World Cup finals in Russia. It had appeared next to the logo of telecommunications company WE, which had a partnership with Egypt’s FA and was a direct competitor to Vodafone.
“Unfortunately, the way this has been dealt with is extremely insulting,” Salah said. “I was hoping dealings would be classier than this.” The Egyptian FA eventually U-turned and gave in to Salah’s demands that his image not be used in conjunction with WE.
Pepsi has been another blue-chip company to attach itself to Salah. An initial 12-month arrangement when still with Roma has been routinely extended and adverts have been shot alongside Messi, Paul Pogba and Raheem Sterling. The latest was aired last year when Salah and former Liverpool team-mate Dejan Lovren were filmed being chased around the streets of Alexandria.
Then there is Salah and his boot supplier, Adidas. He has long been one of the leading faces of their football division and, last year, was part of the tie-up between the German sports manufacturer and luxury brand Gucci.
“The key thing for Salah is that he’s an icon in the Arab world,” says Haddad. “You haven’t had anyone in the same stratosphere for the Arab-speaking world, a massive population with a huge interest in football following international leagues like the Premier League.
“You had Riyad Mahrez there for a while but obviously not to the same extent or for the same length of time. Egypt itself is a huge market with a developing economy and you’ve seen Salah do a lot of campaigns targeting that region. He’s almost the sole, iconic global superstar for the Arab world. That’s a massive thing.”
Salah will never catch Ronaldo and Messi, whose annual earnings were reported by Forbes to be over £100m in 2023, but the Egyptian’s upward trajectory has been remarkable.
Liverpool, too, will have felt the benefits. Salah’s name is the most commonly printed on the back of shirts and together they have made for a happy marketing marriage.
The question, of course, is how long this all lasts. A £150m bid from Saudi club Al Ittihad was turned down last summer and Salah is soon to enter the final 12 months of that lucrative Liverpool deal signed in 2022. There is uncertainty, parked for now, over where his long-term future lies beyond the summer of 2025.
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“There are very few players who move the needle massively for a club,” says Haddad. “Business cases can be built around Messi with clubs seeing huge audience growth. You’ve seen that at Paris Saint-Germain and then at Inter Miami.
“A player needs to bring his own audience to make a difference but with Salah he didn’t bring an audience, his audience grew while he was at the club. The journey has been mutually beneficial for both parties rather than Salah delivering more to Liverpool than they have for him. It’s been an equitable relationship so I don’t think it would cause a massive impact if he left.
“There’s still a lot of iconic talent there and the brands are drawn as much to the club itself. The size of Liverpool’s fanbase isn’t going to change. I don’t think Salah is really driving shirt sales to the extent where Liverpool’s commercial revenues would fall.”
Be sure of one thing, though: Salah remains a commercial magnet.
