There's a limited pot of money to spend on the playing staff and new contracts and transfers will be drawn from the same pot, so yes, a new contract for Salah will reduce the transfer budget assuming he's getting a rise (whether he should be getting a rise at his age is questionable but that's up to Edwards).
Let's say Edwards gives Mo a £50k a week rise, that's 'only' £2.5m so it's pretty minimal in the grand scheme of things, getting £2.5m sliced out of this year's transfer budget (and next year's, and next year's etc depending on how long he signs for)
Let's say instead that Edwards offers him a new contract that Mo doesn't like and he says I'm off and we agree and we get £100m for him, we are gonna get charged £100m at least to replace him. Even if you could clone him, a 25-year old Mo is always going to cost more than a 30-year old Mo.
Then there's the more hidden costs of transfers, agent's fees, which are pretty standard 15%, so if we replaced Salah by buying God knows who for say £120m, there's gonna be an additional £18m going to the agent (it's a tough life being a football agent but somebody's gotta do it).
If we had say £100m to cover transfers and wage increases, losing £18m on agent's fees makes a big dent in that pot of money. You're basically setting light to £18m.
So in the short term, getting players to renew contracts instead of signing replacements is a major positive (as long as they're performing).
But in the long term there's a downside as Salah's value will inevitably start dropping like a stone when he's in his 30s and if we keep him until he's a pensioner we'll never be able to put his sale proceeds towards buying his replacement.
Personally I'd rather give Klopp what he wants right now, and renew Mo's contract rather than trading a player that has performed in every season for us, for someone you just think will do the same - there are no guarantees.
We can't take the short term approach on every single player though as we need to constantly rejuvenate the squad so if Salah gets a new contract that means that one of the other players whose contract is up for renewal this summer probably needs NOT to be given a renewal deal. If not Mo, then who. For me the obvious answer, for obvious reasons, is Keita.
But we don't want Mo Bobby and Sadio all to grow old at the same time, and all their contracts have 2 years left this summer, so if Mo's getting a new contract then maybe either Bobby or Sadio ought NOT to be getting one. That's a b***ard of a call and I'm glad I don't have to make it but based on this season if I had to choose which of them not to renew it would be Sadio. That doesn't mean we'd have to sell him, but are we really going to keep all 3 of these players till they're all say 33 and then suddenly have to cough up £300m or whatever to buy some new lads? That would be irresponsible and I dont see us doing it.
I don't look at the accounts but supposedly the trend under FSG has been to weight more of the playing staff budget towards wages than transfers, so we may not be able to act Billy Big Bollocks in the transfer market but we can at least attract players with decent wages. I'm not stating it as a fact. Seems credible though.
The sooner we can get new contracts sorted the better, so we know who's gonna be here next season and we can concentrate on transfers, so it would be a surprise if we weren't talking to Mo and whoever else at the moment.
It's a massive summer for the club, I think there's about 10 players down to 2 years left. The big priority for me is Virg, who is down to 18 months. I'd be talking to him ahead of any of the others.
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