Jose Mourinho says it was the Chelsea board that decided to sell Mohamed Salah
Former Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho says he never intended to sell Mohamed Salah to AS Roma during his time at the club. The Portuguese manager won three Premier League titles in 2005, 2006, and 2015 across two separate spells at the club.
Salah never had a chance to show his talent at Chelsea due to a lack of game time, while at Roma he enjoyed a decent spell before Liverpool signed the Egyptian, where he burst onto the scene.
Since joining the Reds, the former Blues forward has a Champions League and Premier League winner medal under his belt and is now one of the greatest goal scorers with 150 goals.
The Blues might regret selling Salah this soon after seeing him succeed at Liverpool, and many would blame Mourinho for not giving him enough minutes on the pitch. However, Mourinho has clarified on the Obi One podcast, where he said:
”When people say I let Salah go, I say exactly the opposite. I bought Salah. I was the one who said to buy that guy. He was going from Basel to Liverpool, and I made a fight—I made a war—to make him come to Chelsea.”
”Then comes the part when, to be a Chelsea player, you have to perform, or you need to wait. He didn’t want to wait; he wanted to go on loan. And then Chelsea, at a certain point, decided to sell. He went to Fiorentina and Roma, and that was not me deciding to sell. I was saying let him go on loan if he feels he needs to play every minute of every game.”
When a squad is full of competent players, it can be challenging to give each player sufficient playing time. This was Mourinho’s issue with Salah, who was only 21 when we signed him.
It is clear that Salah won’t get nearly enough playing time because, at that point, the club had players like Eden Hazard, William, and Oscar who established themselves and were preferred over Salah.
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According to Mourinho, a loan move would have been preferable because it would have given him more playing time and helped the other club foster him. However, at that time, Roman Abramovich was the owner of the team, and supporters weren’t particularly lenient if a player took time to grow and this forced the club to sell Mo Salah.