Colombian-born football agent is determined to ensure his ‘Arab global icon’ client is given the respect and money he deserves
The “mixed zone” area in a sports stadium, where athletes can speak to journalists if they wish, is often a nondescript place. At least it was, before Mohamed Salah used it to deliver one of the most infamous interviews in Premier League history.
For journalists working in the mixed zone after the match, it can be a twilight zone. It is common for players to use their mobile phones or wear headphones to avoid giving interviews.
Salah treats the mixed zone differently. It is a stage for him. He has used it now several times to deliver succinct messages – and has always got what he wanted.
It was pure adrenalin last Saturday night in the mixed zone at Leeds when Salah delivered his jaw-dropping comments – just as newspaper deadlines needed to be hit – revealing his relationship with Arne Slot had broken down, the club were throwing him “under the bus” and he may end up leaving Anfield.
It was just the fourth time in his Liverpool career that Salah had stopped at the request of the written press, and many felt it was planned.
“It’s choreographed with him and his agent to cause maximum damage and strengthen his own position,” Telegraph Sport columnist Jamie Carragher said this week, in his role as a pundit on Sky Sports.
Salah previously spoke in a mixed zone at Southampton last November, when the potential for a new contract at Anfield looked far from certain. The Egyptian said he had not received a new offer and that he was “probably more out than in”. It seems he only speaks when he wants something, rather than fronting up every week – win or lose – like his team-mates, in particular Virgil van Dijk and Andy Robertson.
The decision to do so is his, but the role of his agent, Ramy Abbas Issa is now looming large.
Last season’s contract impasse set the tone for player and agent
The impasse over Salah’s contract at the tail end of last season is crucial to how the current campaign has unfolded. The club were under a huge amount of pressure to agree a deal with a man whose goal returns for the previous campaigns were 25, 30, 31, 31, 23, 27 and 44. He was on his way to breaking through the 30-goal mark last season and the club were heading towards another Premier League title.
But it was not a straightforward deal to get sorted. Salah spoke in the St Mary’s mixed zone in November, then negotiations with adviser Abbas carried on through the winter and the deal was announced in April.
Abbas has played an important role as Salah has gone from being sold by Chelsea to becoming one of football’s biggest stars. When interviewed by GQ Middle East the article carried the headline “The Curious Case Of Ramy Abbas”. He is a registered agent with the Football Association and his name is listed on documents for Salah’s last deals, although he is unlike many other intermediaries.
A law graduate from the University of Leicester, his gateway into football was as a translator for Brazilian lawyer Breno Tannuri, who was working on the deals that involved Chelsea signing Juan Cuadrado and Salah heading to Fiorentina in the other direction on loan. Abbas, who also speaks Arabic, gained the trust of Salah and the pair have been working together since. Unlike other football agencies, Abbas has only one client.
There is a different dynamic to an agent having one client rather than several, where time has to be shared. Salah wrote on social media about his representation prior to his move to Fiorentina when Oliver Kronenberg, a former head of Fifa’s legal department, was quoted in the Italian media about the deal. “Please don’t take any news from my ex-agent Oliver Kronenberg and don’t believe any of his words,” Salah wrote.
Abbas has been in partnership with Salah ever since as his client made his way back to the Premier League, where goalscoring records were broken and Liverpool’s 30-year title wait ended.
Carragher says the mixed-zone interviews are choreographed with Abbas’s help. Certainly, the impression that Abbas gives is that it is him and his client versus the rest. And doing what is best for Salah is the only thing that matters to him.
Abbas has close to 200,000 followers on X and quotes Donald Trump on the platform. He hit the “like” button when Kevin De Bruyne signed an extension at Manchester City, an older player who had gone into negotiations armed with his own data on how important he is to his team.
“People should really listen to him,” Abbas said of Salah in 2022. “I don’t think there has ever been an Arab personality that has reached the heights he has. In all of the fields he is the only truly international Arab global icon.”
Slot has also been talking to Abbas regularly in the last week or so, the manager saying: “We have spoken a lot in the last week after the Sunderland game, there were a lot of conversations between his representatives and ours, our representatives and him, between him and me, and today I will speak to him again.”
Salah’s time at Liverpool has also been lucrative, with his company Salah UK Commercial Ltd worth £36.9m according to the latest accounts. When the deal was agreed in April, committing Salah to Liverpool until 2027, it was the most lucrative pro-rata contract in the club’s history. The mixed-zone interview in Southampton played its part.
Rare interactions with press always designed to make a point
Salah had previously spoken to reporters in his first season at Anfield, when he fulfilled a long-standing promise that he would stop to talk to the press if he reached 40 goals, and he also did so after the euphoria of winning the Champions League in Madrid. On that night he had erased the memory of the final a year earlier, when Sergio Ramos had forced him off with a dislocated shoulder, and perhaps there was a message to the Spaniard in this mixed-zone encounter at Estadio Metropolitano.
“I looked at the picture from last year before the game,” said Salah. “I just looked at it one time and said: ‘OK, let’s go.’ I was very disappointed that I got injured and went out after 30 minutes and we lost the game. It was something to motivate me to win this time.”
It was his first silverware since winning the Swiss Super League with Basel, and he was on his way to a different level of profile. He had scored in the Champions League final against Tottenham Hotspur and was now a winner of one of the biggest prizes in Europe in a relationship with Liverpool that was mutually beneficial.
“Mo Salah was known as the guy who failed at Chelsea. That’s just a fact. He never won a major trophy before he came to Liverpool. You weren’t a big star before you came to Liverpool,” Carragher pointed out during his analysis of the Salah fallout.
Carragher’s point was that even the best players in the world need 10 team-mates on the pitch and a manager to get them playing efficiently. Salah’s team-mates helped him with defensive work on the pitch over eight years. Off the pitch, when it came to the pre-match press conferences before Uefa games, it would always be a team-mate on duty. Yet by speaking out at Elland Road, Salah’s critics argued he was thinking only about himself.
Salah got what he wanted after his previous interactions with the press, as his and Abbas’s plan came together. Will it be the same result after dropping a bombshell on a freezing night in Yorkshire?