Former Liverpool CEO Peter Moore has claimed club owners Fenway Sports Group are "working feverishly" to secure Mohamed Salah, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Virgil van Dijk to new contracts at Anfield.
Despite an ungoing progress and an unexpected upturn in events at Anfield, due to the change in manager as well as staff, the trio of Salah, Van Dijk, and Alexander-Arnold would be able to speak to clubs outside of England over a pre-contract agreement from January 1, as their contract with the Merseyside club is set to run out in over six months.
All three have so far been an integral part of Arne Slot’s system, having won 15 of 17 games so far this term with a return to action this weekend at Southampton while being five points clear in the Premier League and in the top spot of the revamped Champions League.
With Real Madrid continuing to be intensely linked with Alexander-Arnold and Salah being the subject of an offer from the Saudi Pro League in August of 2023—when Liverpool rejected a bid worth up to £150m from champions Al-Ittihad—Moore, who was Reds chief executive for three years between 2017 and 2020, has doubled down on the plan Liverpool has towards the trio.
Speaking to Soccerex in Miami, Moore says Liverpool owners FSG are determined to secure all three extended contracts as the impasse drags on.
“Ownership, I know ownership (FSG) is working feverishly to get deals done with all three and whether it is all three, two of the three, one of three or none of the three, I don’t know.”
“You look at those players and what I do like is they all seem dedicated right now and there is nobody, particularly those three, that has taken a game off for some reason. And they are, even in Trent’s case, they are the senior citizens and you look at what they offer.”
“So come January, particularly in Trent’s case, we’ll see what happens but I know that ownership is talking with their respective agents, I am sure feverishly. But it won’t be cheap.”
Moore added:
“And I think ownership will look back and they lost Philippe Coutinho (to Barcelona in January 2018), which was unbelievably dramatic when I was there. But [the] ownership knew this was an opportunity for us to take one player and buy two world-class players for the money Barcelona was paying for Philippe and it worked out brilliantly as a result.”
On the start Slot has made since succeeding Jurgen Klopp in the summer, Moore said:
“It’s too early to say but to the point of when you think about when Jurgen announces he is leaving and everyone says: ‘This is the end, Liverpool needs to go in transition, it’s going to be a tough two or three seasons’.
“[The question was] who are they going to get? There’s talk of Xabi Alonso, they end up getting who? Arne Slot, who many of us knew but I think the great majority had never paid attention to.”
