Mohamed Salah Joins Trabzonspor: A New Chapter in His Career
Mohamed Salah has finally made his move. Not to Saudi Arabia. Not to MLS. To Trabzon.
After months of noise and rumour, the Liverpool great has signed a two-year deal with Trabzonspor, closing the book on one of the most devastating Premier League careers of the modern era and opening another in one of Europe’s loudest, most combustible footballing corners.
This is not the ending many had written for him. It might be more interesting than any of them.
Why Trabzon, and why now?
For years, Saudi Pro League clubs circled Salah like sharks. Al-Ittihad pushed late. MLS, with Sporting Kansas City among the admirers, saw him as a marquee answer to the post-Messi landscape. Both could have drowned him in money.
He walked away from all of it to stay in Europe.
Trabzonspor’s offer is still enormous by any measure. The club’s filing to the Turkish stock exchange confirmed a salary of around £14.5m per season and a 20% cut of Salah-branded merchandise. Other reports in Turkey have spoken of a package closer to £7.3m per season plus bonuses and commercial revenue, but the message is clear: this is the biggest deal in the club’s history, and one of the boldest in the Super Lig era.
Yet money alone does not explain it. Salah is 34, fresh from dragging Egypt into the World Cup knockout stages and delivering one of the best campaigns of his career in 2024-25. He still wants the stage that matters most to elite players: European competition.
Trabzonspor can give him that. They finished third in last season’s Super Lig and head into this month’s Europa League play-offs. Win over two legs and they reach the league phase; lose and they drop into the Conference League. Either way, continental nights remain on the calendar. For a player of Salah’s status, that matters.
A different kind of giant
If the destination is Europe, most would expect the route through Istanbul. Galatasaray. Fenerbahce. Besiktas. The traditional triangle of Turkish power.
Besiktas even tried. Talks took place, then collapsed over the financial structure of the deal. The door opened, and Trabzonspor walked through it.
Trabzonspor do not carry the global shine of the Istanbul giants, but they are no upstarts. Seven league titles. Champions as recently as 2021-22. Turkish Cup winners last season. A fiercely proud club built on challenging the established order rather than bowing to it.
Fatih Tekke’s team finished third in the Super Lig, earned another crack at Europe and now land the most marketable player ever to wear their colours. The reaction was instant and visceral. Hundreds of fans turned out to greet Salah, a sea of claret and blue surging to welcome the man they see as the new face of their club.
Former Rangers midfielder Ryan Jack, who has spent the last two seasons in Turkey, recognised the scene immediately.
Turkish football lives on emotion. The stands are hot, the noise relentless, the loyalty almost tribal. “The fans are incredibly passionate,” Jack told BBC Sport. “The big clubs have huge support and they really get behind their teams.” Trabzon is no exception.
Salah felt that from the start. At his unveiling he briefly pulled on a number 61 shirt – a number that means everything in this city. It is Trabzon’s vehicle registration code, a symbol supporters celebrate so intensely that the 61st minute of games has become a ritual. He played to that culture straight away.
When the real football starts, he will wear 10. The number he wears for Egypt. Team-mate Ernest Muci agreed to give it up, a clear sign of the hierarchy that now exists in the dressing room: Salah is the reference point.
A league on the rise – and a strange economic edge
Salah’s arrival is not an isolated splash. It is another wave in a rising tide.
- Victor Osimhen
- Leroy Sane
- Ilkay Gundogan
- Nathan Ake
- Leandro Trossard
Big names now operate in the Super Lig. Trabzonspor already boast Andre Onana, Ruslan Malinovskyi and Stefan Savic. Last summer, the division posted the third-highest net transfer spend in world football, behind only the Premier League and the Saudi Pro League.
The reasons are as much financial as footballing. Turkey’s leading clubs earn heavily in euros through UEFA competitions, while many of their day-to-day costs are in Turkish lira. Years of high inflation have eroded the real value of old domestic debts, giving clubs more room to manoeuvre than their balance sheets might suggest at first glance.
The result is a league that can offer serious wages, feverish support and European football to stars in the latter part of their careers. Jack has seen the effect first-hand.
“The league is getting stronger every year and you're seeing more and more big names joining,” he said. “Salah is probably the biggest name to move to Turkey in recent years. It shows the league is growing and it might persuade other top players to consider going there.”
He talks about the “great stadiums” and “great cities”, about clubs that go out of their way to help foreign players settle. His own experience was simple: “I loved it.”
This is the environment Salah walks into: noisy, ambitious, imperfect – and increasingly attractive.
Between the elite and the wilderness
Strip away the emotion and the numbers and a harder truth remains. The Super Lig is not among Europe’s elite competitions.
Opta currently ranks it as the 14th-strongest domestic league in world football, behind the top flights in Denmark and Poland and even England’s Championship. Turkish clubs have struggled to punch through the glass ceiling in Europe. Since Galatasaray lifted the UEFA Cup in 2000, only one Turkish side has reached the semi-finals of a major UEFA tournament.
That is the gap Salah steps into: not the Champions League elite, not the semi-retirement of a non-European league, but a middle ground.
For him, it is a compromise that suits. He avoids the perception of walking away from high-level football, keeps his place on the continental stage and immerses himself in one of the game’s most intense atmospheres. He will be the focal point of a team with domestic ambitions and European aspirations, not a final billboard for a league still building its football credibility.
For Trabzonspor, this is far bigger than what he can do on the right wing.
Salah’s presence instantly amplifies the club’s global profile. Shirt sales, sponsorship conversations, international media attention – all of it spikes the moment he signs. He is one of the most recognisable footballers of his generation, a commercial force as much as a sporting one.
Jack expects the ripple effect to spread across the league. “Liverpool fans, and people who love watching Salah, will definitely take notice and start following the league,” he said. When he moved to Turkey, his own family and friends began watching games they had never previously considered. Salah’s move will do that on a vastly larger scale.
The new chapter
So what does he actually gain?
He stays in Europe. He plays in front of some of the most passionate fans anywhere. He fights for domestic trophies and European nights. And he becomes the undisputed figurehead of one of Turkey’s most historic clubs, rather than just another superstar in a league of superstars.
It is not the move most predicted. It might be the one that keeps his story interesting.
Now comes the real question: in a league desperate to close the gap to Europe’s elite, can Mohamed Salah do in Trabzon what he once did in Liverpool – drag a club to places it has not reached in a generation?
