Mo Salah, Kylian Mbappe, Liverpool and transfer: Is this the perfect headline?

The January transfer window is closed but there’s still LIVE Liverpool talk of Kylian Mbappe and Mo Salah…

Salah Mbappe Salah blah blah blah Liverpool
We’re all in the clicks business; we know how this sh*t works.

And there’s little doubt that man in the Mirror and Liverpool propagandist Mark Jones (who featured in these pages on Monday after Liverpool’s defeat in which ‘nothing was lost’) sat down to write his latest piece with one intention: Get the words ‘Mbappe’, ‘Salah’ and ‘Liverpool’ into one headline. It’s a noble pursuit.

And that’s how we land here:

Mo Salah watching Kylian Mbappe’s three Real Madrid demands amid Liverpool contract issue

Is he ‘watching’? Well, it literally takes one paragraph to concede that ‘Mo Salah is likely to be keeping a watching brief’.

That’s not the same thing. And you know it.

The situation is that Mbappe – whose contract expires this summer – has made several eye-watering demands of Real Madrid as he runs down his PSG contract.

The likelihood is that something will give during the negotiations and that Real will eventually get their man, for that is what Mbappe has wanted all along, despite his fondness for Liverpool and the Reds’ admirable persistence in keeping in contact with him should the opportunity arise to sign him.

That chance hasn’t yet materialised in any real way, but the presence of Salah means that it hasn’t had to. But now having entered the final 18 months of his contract, and with Jurgen Klopp rounding his final lap as Liverpool manager, suddenly there are questions circulating around Liverpool’s prolific forward.

It really is ‘admirable’ that Liverpool have ‘kept in contact’ with one of the world’s most brilliant footballers. This really does mean more.

‘Suddenly’ there are questions about Salah? Bollocks. There were shedloads of questions about Salah last summer when it became clear that he was the dream signing for Saudi Arabian clubs and that he could clearly be tempted.

But we’re still not quite grasping the connection between Salah and Mbappe’s Real Madrid demands, despite the writer’s best efforts to link the two.

The prospect of a money-spinning switch to Saudi Arabia has of course been on the cards for Salah ever since last summer, but would he really want to go yet? He’ll turn 32 in the summer, is in superb shape bar the recent hamstring injury, and is still arguably the best player in the Premier League.

‘Arguably’ is doing a shedload of lifting in that sentence; Rodri, Kevin de Bruyne and Erling Haaland all want a piece of that argument.

What about a move to another European powerhouse then? Perhaps Paris Saint-Germain in the summer once Mbappe has departed? It would certainly be a better sporting move than Saudi, and if Salah fancies a change of scenery while still operating in Europe then it would make sense.

That is why he is likely to be monitoring the movements around Mbappe pretty closely, both in terms of a new contract he could negotiate with Liverpool and a potential switch to another club if he fancies one.

There’s that word ‘likely’ again. There is a chance that Salah might fancy a switch to PSG but the idea that he could negotiate a new contract with Liverpool that takes inspiration from Mbappe’s demands of Real Madrid is absurd. Mbappe is seven years his junior; there is no parity here.

But that really doesn’t matter because Salah, Mbappe and Liverpool.

READ MORE: Van Dijk and Salah exit? Ranking Liverpool squad by how likely they are to follow Klopp out

NOT Liverpool transfer news LIVE
Obviously, the masters of this business are the Liverpool Echo, whose daily live transfer blog (can transfers be ‘live’ outside of the transfer window?) has Mbappe in the headline approximately 87% of the time. It’s probably hard-coded now.

This is the latest LIVE Liverpool transfer news:

Liverpool transfer news LIVE – Kylian Mbappe update, Tosin Adarabioyo wanted, Mohamed Salah injury latest

The Mbappe update is that ‘Paris Saint-Germain star Kylian Mbappe has reportedly outlined his three demands for whichever club he joins this summer’.

The ‘whichever club’ is delicious because it ain’t sodding Liverpool, is it? Perhaps the blog should be renamed ‘NOT Liverpool transfer news LIVE’; more capitals can never hurt.

‘Mohamed Salah injury latest’ doesn’t sound like transfer news, but how else do you get his name in the same headline as Mbappe?

The BIGGEST anti-climax
You know what Mediawatch loves more than almost anything else in the media? Is it supercomputers? Nope but close. Who operates supercomputers? ‘Boffins’, that’s who.

The top story on the MailOnline football homepage is this:

The BIGGEST Premier League under-performers: Stats boffins rank Casemiro, Antony and one other Man United star alongside Enzo Fernandez… but which Liverpool stalwart topped all four of them?!

They really must be the ‘BIGGEST Premier League under-performers’ because they have rolled out the capitals.

So let’s see these BIG under-performers…

Manchester United’s recruitment in the past two years has come under plenty of criticism, and now three of their recent acquisitions have been ranked among the Premier League’s 20 biggest under-performers.

At this point you will be shocked to discover that Antony is not playing very well at the moment and neither is Casemiro. Thank f*** for those ‘boffins’, eh?

But the thing that is really tickling Mediawatch is the identity of the player who the ‘boffins’ have pin-pointed as the BIGGEST Premier League under-performer. Oddly, his name does not appear in the headline. Weird that.

Step forward Mr Josh Cullen who, according to the boffins’ calculations, has not been playing as well in the Premier League for a poor Burnley side as he did in the Championship. We would tease ‘more as we get it’, but we just don’t have the brain capacity to be ‘boffins’.