Mohamed Salah could find himself at the middle of a club vs country row with Egypt wanting to include him in their squad for next year’s Olympic Games.
The Liverpool forward is already set to miss a number of games in January and February as a result of the Africa Cup of Nations, with the 31-year-old set to captain his nation at the latest edition of the tournament in the Ivory Coast.
But Egypt’s Under-23s manager has now admitted that he would like to include Salah as an overage player in his squad for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, which take place between July 26 and August 11. Any player selected will likely miss part of pre-season and the start of the 2024/25 season.
“I am doing my best to choose the young players who will participate in the upcoming Olympics,” Rogerio Micale said, quoted by Ahram Online. "We still have one year to think of the matter and evaluate the situation, but for sure we welcome Salah… Salah is as significant as Neymar in Brazil.”
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Salah had wanted to represent Egypt at the delayed 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo in 2021. However, Liverpool chose to exercise their right to block the forward from participating in non-FIFA-sanctioned international tournaments, given they were already losing him to the Africa Cup of Nations duty in January 2022.
As a result, while Egypt may want to call up Salah next summer, the Reds would be within their rights to again block his call-up if they so wished.