It was a football decision by the Moneyballers. If every player has his price, if the mathematical values used on the balance sheet can drive sporting decisions on grounds of logic rather than emotion, the £150m Al-Ittihad offered for a 31-year-old with two years left on his contract would have been accepted. Fenway Sports Group, Liverpool’s owners and businessmen who tried to hire the original Moneyballer, Billy Beane, for Boston Red Sox, have long followed the numbers.
Yet if the message from Anfield was clear, that Mohamed Salah was not for sale and that, confronted with the prospect of a salary perhaps even larger than those his former teammates Jordan Henderson and Fabinho get between them in Saudi Arabia, the Egyptian did not seem tempted, other numbers have an eloquence.
