Liverpool chief confirms real £308m reason behind Mohamed Salah’s selfie celebration against Tottenham

Mohamed Salah’s move from Roma to Liverpool for an initial £34m in 2017 was a then club record. Many pundits balked at the fee, but it’s a deal that has come typify FSG’s 15-year reign at Anfield.

So often, Fenway Sports Group are right when almost everyone else is wrong.

Incidentally, Mohamed Salah’s £34m fee came with around £10m worth of add-ons. Eight years, 244 goals, 133 assists and nine trophies later, it’s fair to say most of those have probably been achieved.

His latest strike, of course, came against Anfield on Sunday. Liverpool are Premier League champions for the second time in the FSG era – and the Boston-based owners have proven everyone wrong again.

Liverpool will end the season with a positive net spend in the transfer market, a fact which – bizarre as it sounds with the club now crowned champions – was seen in some quarters as an indictment of FSG.

The owners are too conservative, too fixated on commercial income, too focused on the bottom line. That was the charge from some, at least.

This was the same narrative that dogged the the will-they-won’t-they contract stand-offs with Salah and Virgil van Dijk, as well as Real Madrid-bound Trent Alexander-Arnold.

With hindsight, it’s easy too dismiss those claims. Liverpool’s recruitment and retention has been almost spotless under FSG in a period where wage and transfer inflation is out of control, after all.

That said, the scars from the European Super League coup run deep. It’s hard to blame fans that doubt John Henry, Tom Werner, Mike Gordon and their deputies in Boston have their best interests at heart.

Ultimately, these guys didn’t get involved in football finance for days like the Premier League title party after Arne Slot’s side’s 5-1 demolition of Tottenham, though they are certainly a perk of the job.

Every moment of glory that coincides with soaring revenues is, at it’s core, marketing to FSG. That’s the name of the game in their capital appreciation model.

One day, they will sell Liverpool for an enormous, stupefying profit on the £300m they paid Tom Hicks and George Gillett in 2010.

By most estimations, Liverpool are probably now worth about £4.5bn. That’s a compound annual growth rate of around 20 per cent, which is better than just about any asset class you can invest in.

They won’t exit any time soon, mind. As far as FSG are concerned, there’s far more upside to come.

And as Salah celebrated his 33rd goal of the season against Tottenham, there was a show of how FSG have got to this point.

• READ MORE: Liverpool owners FSG could seal ‘dream’ takeover amid £1.7bn twist as Michael Edwards leads talks

Liverpool chief confirms Mohamed Salah selfie celebration was a marketing stunt

“That’ll be worth a few quid,” said Gary Neville, seeing Salah snap a seemingly spontaneous selfie in front of the Kop after netting Liverpool’s fourth against Spurs.

He wasn’t wrong, though probably not for the reasons he was alluding to in his commentary.

Liverpool have been sponsored by Google’s Pixel smartphone brand since 2023 and, as has now been well documented, Salah was handed this phone by a club staffer before his celebration.

Kate Theobold, the club’s global commercial director has now all but confirmed that the moment was choreographed by Liverpool’s commercial team.

Theobald, who is the second most senior commercial official at the club after CCO Ben Latty, has shared a LinkedIn post from another user which reads: ‘I’ll openly eat my hat if that wasn’t a planned move.’

The value of Liverpool’s partnership with Google Pixel isn’t known, though experts canvassed by TBR Football estimated it in the £3-5m-a-year range.

Liverpool’s annual commercial income was £308m per their last accounts, with the bulk of that figure coming from sponsorship. That is an astonishing rise from commercial income of £62m in FSG’s first year.

To justify increasing prices, clubs like the Merseysiders are offering sponsors more access, more activation opportunities, and greater license to leverage their brand and intellectual property.

With Google having inserted themselves into a defining moment in Liverpool history and accrued hundreds of millions of ad impressions, this ticked all of those boxes.

• READ MORE: Liverpool could use Caoimhin Kelleher in swap deal to sign £50m star for Arne Slot

Google might not like what Salah did at full-time

Some people think the Salah celebration is iconic regardless of whether it was commercially driven. Others think it cheapens one of the most famous moments in the Egyptian King’s career.

We’ll let you make up your own mind, but there is no way of framing this other than a massive, massive win for Google.

However, there was perhaps one very minor downside.

At full time, Salah took more selfies with the fans on their own phones. The most widely circulated shots in the press appear to show the forward using an Apple iPhone, Google Pixel’s biggest competitor.

• READ MORE: The truth about Liverpool only having £45m to spend this summer as FSG set budget for Arne Slot

Liverpool vs Tottenham finances

In many ways, it was fitting that Liverpool won the title against Tottenham.

On paper, the clubs’ ownership groups have very similar business models.

Both have strict wage structures that have risen in lockstep with revenue in recent years, both are among the best at commercialising their clubs, and both have invested next to nothing from their own pockets.

The difference, however, is that FSG have had huge success with the self-sufficient financial mode, while Spurs manifestly have not.

Now, Spurs are going backwards fast – both financially and on the pitch. Operating losses are rising and they have nothing to show for it.

FSG meanwhile have performed a miraculous feat of alchemy.

Position	Team	Played MP	Won W	Drawn D	Lost L	For GF	Against GA	Diff GD	Points Pts
1	LiverpoolLiverpool	34	25	7	2	80	32	48	82

The only money they have invested in the club was in the form of shareholder loans to fund the redevelopment of Anfield. Almost everything the club has spent, it has earned.

There have been fallow seasons, of course, but Liverpool are the only club in recent times that has had sustained domestic success without a benefactor model.

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