Liverpool are set to return to training on Friday but it’s what happens next between Arne Slot and Mohamed Salah that is the big story before the visit from Brighton & Hove Albion
01:00, 12 Dec 2025Updated 01:12, 12 Dec 2025
Mohamed Salah walks off the pitch with Arne Slot following Liverpool’s draw with Leeds United at Elland Road, December 06, 2025(Image: Liverpool FC/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
Oh to be a fly on the wall of the AXA Training Centre when Mohamed Salah welcomes his returning team-mates back to their Kirkby base this morning (Friday). After flying back to Merseyside on Wednesday afternoon, fresh from their vital 1-0 win over Inter in the Champions League on Tuesday, the players are set to work at their £50m training facility once more to begin preparations for Saturday’s visit of Brighton & Hove Albion.
With Arne Slot pencilled in to speak to the media at a 9am press conference, the Reds head coach is likely to have the straight bat lined up for the inevitable barrage of questions over his communication with Salah since that win at San Siro.
It is, of course, the final game for the 33-year-old before he jets off to the Africa Cup of Nations with Egypt and, as revealed by the man himself at Elland Road on Saturday, his parents will be at Anfield to witness the afternoon unfold.
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“I called my mum and dad and told them to come to the Brighton game,” Salah revealed in his seven-and-a-half-minute pipe bomb on Saturday night. “It doesn’t matter if I play or not. I’m going to enjoy it. Just going to be at Anfield and say goodbye to the fans before the African Cup, because I don’t know what is going to happen when I am there.”
The ambiguity of Salah’s words have acted as cover for the Reds superstar. On the one hand, the talk of having to “say goodbye” can be interpreted as a player who is now bound for Morocco with the Pharaohs until at least the early days of 2026.
Alternatively, the comments could be construed that he meant he might be bidding farewell to the supporters for the final time, which, even with the breakneck speed with which football now moves at, would be a remarkable development.
It’s hard not to speculate that Salah’s frustrations have been brewing for quite some time given the first and third games that he was left out of the team for were just six days apart between November 30 and December 6.
Factor in that he actually played 45 minutes of the middle game in that sequence, in the 1-1 draw with Sunderland, and it is either a case of Salah flying way off the handle on the back of what is standard resting and rotating or that something far more grave has been bubbling away for some time.
It was instructive to see comments from Jurgen Klopp being carried this week by the BBC where the iconic former Reds boss spoke about Salah being prickly whenever his name wasn’t on a Liverpool team sheet.
“I wouldn’t say Mo is easy to manage, but he’s not difficult to manage,” Klopp says on a new BBC documentary titled ‘Mo Salah: Never Give Up’. “You have problems with Mo Salah if he’s not playing, you have problems with Mo Salah if you take him off.”
Salah was a second-half substitute in what was undoubtedly Liverpool’s best performance of the season at the time when they beat Eintracht Frankfurt in the Champions League on October 22.
It was a night when Florian Wirtz showed flashes of his quality, Alexander Isak and Hugo Ekitike started together for the first time, and the Reds cast aside what had been a difficult few weeks with a 5-1 drubbing of their hosts in Germany.
Rather than soak up the acclaim of an important win with his colleagues, however, Salah quickly took to social media to change the profile pictures from an image of him with the Premier League title – in full Liverpool regalia – to one with his children.
The timing, of course, could have been merely coincidental but Salah, and more pointedly his agent, the Colombian lawyer Ramy Abbas, rarely move online without a calculation of how it will be viewed by the millions of followers.
As things stand, the great question is whether or not Salah will be involved at all against Brighton. Any sense that he will be given a send-off will only alert interested parties – namely those in the Saudi Pro League – that Liverpool may be open to doing business on a player who is only outscored in 133 years of club history by two men in Roger Hunt and Ian Rush.
Fans may sing the name in support of a someone who has generally come under fire for his shocking post-match interview in Yorkshire but few of the match-going support, according to the dozens spoken to by the ECHO this week, appear to have the appetite for a civil war where star player squares off against title-winning coach.
Slot, then, will have plausible deniability that he is yet to properly converse with Salah before Friday’s press conference. Unless there has been a great thawing on WhatsApp Messenger on Wednesday then any real discussions between the pair, if at all, will only take place before or after Friday’s training session.
The specifics of that conversation – should it take place at all – could quietly have huge ramifications for the rest of the Liverpool season and well beyond it.