Salah edges towards Beşiktaş while his agent insists nothing is agreed
A one-year deal with an option, around 12 million euros a year, and a club president who says the player has already said yes. Salah’s representative says he has no idea where his client is going.
Jul 26, 2026
Mohamed Salah has been a free agent since he left Liverpool at the end of last season, and for two months the guessing has run through Saudi Arabia, MLS, Fenerbahçe and a Juventus pitch that never quite got off the ground. The answer now looks like being Beşiktaş. What nobody can say with confidence is when, or whether the people involved are describing the same deal.
What is actually agreed
Nicolò Schira reported on 25 July that Salah and Beşiktaş have an agreement in principle on a contract running to 2027, with an option to extend to 2028, worth in the region of 12 million euros a year. He arrives on a free, so the whole cost of the deal sits in wages and whatever the intermediaries take. Beşiktaş believe it can be finished inside a few days, though the paperwork and the last of the financial detail are not done.
Vincenzo Italiano has been the one doing the persuading. The Beşiktaş head coach is building a squad that already includes Leandro Trossard, who left Arsenal for Istanbul in mid-July for an initial 15.3 million pounds, and a Salah signing on top of that would be the biggest name the Turkish Super Lig has landed in years.
The part that does not add up
Beşiktaş president Serdar Adali went public on 19 July with a version of events that was blunt even by transfer-window standards. Salah, he said, had already said yes. “Salah gave his approval. He spoke to our head coach Vincenzo Italiano and sporting director and said yes.” Adali then accused Salah’s representatives of moving the goalposts once the story broke, claiming the agent had asked for a 35 per cent commission on the deal, a figure he called unbelievable and one the club refuses to pay.
Two days before that, Ramy Abbas Issa had said something very different. Asked about the Beşiktaş reports, Salah’s long-time agent replied: “I personally do not know where Mohamed will play next season. What does that tell you?” He added that they still did not know where Salah would end up, but might know soon.
Both statements cannot be true in the way each side wants them read. Either the player has verbally committed and the fight is over money going to his camp, or nothing is settled and a club president has talked publicly about a deal that exists mostly in his own head. Adali was specific enough about the conversations with Italiano that the first reading is the more likely one, but Abbas rarely bothers to answer transfer stories at all, and the fact that he answered this one is its own kind of signal.
Why Turkey, and why now
Salah turned 34 in June. He told Liverpool in March that he would be leaving at the end of the season and played his last game at Anfield on 24 May, a final-day meeting with Brentford that ended with the whole ground on its feet, closing out nine years in which he won everything the club had to win. Then came a World Cup with Egypt, and after it, a market that never produced the offer the early reporting assumed was coming. Saudi money was there. So, at various points, were Fenerbahçe and a Juventus project that Luciano Spalletti was openly keen on. None of it converted.
Beşiktaş finished fourth in the Süper Lig last season and will be in the Europa League, not the Champions League, and a one-year deal with an option is not the contract a player signs when he is spoilt for choice. That is the honest reading of it. It is also a club that will build an entire season around him, in a stadium that will treat him like a head of state. At 34, with the ball still doing what he tells it, that is not the worst version of a next chapter.
The deal is close. Until somebody produces a signature, close is all it is.