It began with a text message during the World Cup. Trabzonspor's president, Ertugrul Dogan, was watching Egypt play when he picked up his phone and messaged his manager, Fatih Tekke. "Do you want Mohamed Salah?" Within weeks Salah was leading the club's traditional three-count chant in front of a crowd at Trabzon airport. The surprise was never that he left Anfield. It was that, having decided to stay in Europe, he chose the Black Sea coast over Istanbul, where the Süper Lig's marquee signings have almost always gone.
The operation
Trabzonspor's pursuit ran in the shadows. They used their former winger Mahmoud Hassan, known as Trézéguet, as the intermediary, and Salah's Egypt team-mate spoke with him daily to talk him into considering the move. For weeks Besiktas looked the likelier destination, and that is roughly where they went wrong. They repeatedly fed information about their interest and their talks to the press, at one point putting out that the deal was done while a real distance in consensus remained, which Salah's business partner, Ramy Abbas, had to counter publicly on X. Negotiations then collapsed over the financial structure of the deal, opening the door. Trabzonspor worked quietly by comparison, and Dogan made a point of noting there is a manner in which a situation this size has to be handled.
What the money says