Salah at 30 - Liverpool's missing £3m and Reds approach leading to 'Last Dance'

For the cost of just £3m, the Mohamed Salah x Liverpool love affair could have started three-and-a-half years earlier.

In theory, anyway.

It was January 2014, and the Reds were seeking to sign a 21-year-old Egyptian winger from Basel to add a bit of depth to Brendan Rodgers' extremely thin squad, a group that included the goals of Luis Suarez and Daniel Sturridge, the youthful exuberance of Raheem Sterling and Philippe Coutinho and the experience and drive of Steven Gerrard, but was still somewhat built on sand.

There wasn't much beyond the first XI to sustain a title challenge, and so the dashing qualities of the young Salah, who had impressed against Tottenham and Chelsea in the Europa League the previous season, were seen as a perfect foil for the more established players ahead of him. More perfect than Iago Aspas and Victor Moses were, anyway.

But at FSG's Liverpool everything has a price, something that Salah has become all too aware of.

Back then the club valued the young wide man at £8m, and they were unwilling to go above that fee. Basel touted around for more interest and more money, and then sold him to Chelsea for £11m.

"Negotiations took a long time, because Basel rejected more than one offer," said Salah back then.

"They felt the transfer fee was not that high. I was waiting for Liverpool because I really like Liverpool. I was eager to join them."

But instead of Rodgers' fairly giddy band of upstarts who would go on to have an unlikely tilt at the title, Salah was thrust into the arms of Jose Mourinho, and we know what happened from there.

At the time it was clear that Salah saw the linkup with the now legendary manager as something he couldn't turn down, and he spoke of Mourinho calling him to praise him as a player and tell him that he had plans for him within his squad. No young footballer - or the people they surround themselves with - would ignore that.

But as others have experienced under the Portuguese, particularly young attacking talents, there is a chasm between Mourinho having plans for you and trusting you outright, as Salah was quick to discover.

In what has been described as "a clash of personalities", it simply didn't work for Salah at Chelsea, we all know that, but it was a sign of the ambition within that he - and again, his people - chiselled his way out of Stamford Bridge to join Fiorentina on loan on what was supposed to be an 18-month deal.

After an electric half-season in Florence - during which he had again stated a desire to play for Liverpool according to his former teammate Micah Richards - the ambition was on show again.

Salah wanted to go to Roma, and so he - and yep, again, his advisors - were determined to push through a second loan deal from Chelsea to the Italian capital, thereby reneging on the agreement with Fiorentina. It went all the way to those lofty decision-makers at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, but he got there in the end.

Roma was where he would prove he can be a player for the very top level, initially on loan for 2015-16 season and then contracted by the club for the following campaign. After a stellar 2016-17 the next step was waiting, and that would finally come at Liverpool three-and-half-years after he first wanted to make the move.

And we know what has happened since, because it has been extraordinary.

So special, in fact, that it easy to suggest that Liverpool made a costly error in not forking out that extra £3m back in early 2014, but the Salah they were signing for around 13 times that fee in 2017 was a different player to the one available back then. And of course Liverpool, under Jurgen Klopp, were a very different club.

That union between player, manager and squad has been at the very forefront of what the Reds have achieved in the past few years, with Klopp's "doubters to believers" tag to the fore but perhaps not applicable to Salah, who has simply always believed that he is destined for the top.

He has now scaled those heights with Liverpool, at times touching the summit claimed by the very best player on the planet before a more recent dip in performances, probably due to fatigue more than anything else.

He's fighting against it, telling the world that he wanted the new season to start immediately in the wake of the Champions League final defeat to Real Madrid in Paris, even though that world knows he will be all the better for the rest.

Having turned 30 on Wednesday, and after being pictured already enjoying his summer holidays, Salah will have his eye on the impact he can make next season, particularly as he has - as he'll see it - come up against Liverpool's unwillingness to splash the cash for a second time in his career.

Because as the effective swap of Darwin Nunez and Sadio Mane shows, the Reds and their owners remain unwilling to break the wage structure, and more importantly the wage culture, that has taken them this far. The idea remains that most of the top players stay on a broadly similar pay packet, with no star rocketing above their teammates despite their quality.

That can only go on for so long of course, and Mane - who turned 30 in April - is perfectly within his rights to look for the type of deal that is available for a player of his class at most other elite clubs. Just as Salah is too.

With the Senegalese opting to pursue a move a year before his deal runs out, and Salah deciding he wants to stay, all roads still point to the Egyptian wanting to remain at Anfield for longer if a deal can be reached that he and his people deem acceptable.

If one can't, and that currently looks the most likely outcome, then all parties should be grown-up enough to go into the forward's final season at the club with the desire to make it his and Liverpool's best ever. A 'Last Dance' scenario could play out, and Salah, who will get another rest during the World Cup, could revel in the spotlight.

We'll never know the answer to the £3m question, but when the Reds did finally get their man it turned out to be one of the best pieces of business in the club's history.

Salah gave the latter half of his 20s to the club, and the first season of his 30s could be quite the sight.