What Liverpool’s scouts saw that night propelled him to high on their wanted list. Salah had added the ability to cut inside from the right flank but there were new facets to his game. Cole was recognised as the best left-back in the world yet Salah, still only 20, had persistently made him uncomfortable.
Work began in earnest to secure his signature, scouting trips continued and it came to the point in January 2014, when Ian Ayre, the former chief executive, and Fallows, the then chief scout, flew out to Switzerland to do a £12m deal.
‘I can’t tell you how angry everyone was’
“What happened next was unbelievable,” recalls Ayre, who is now chief executive of Major League Soccer side Nashville. “We’d done all we had to do with Mo and his former agent [Sascha Empacher]. We’d agreed the wages, the fee and we’d had great discussions with Basel’s president, Bernhard Heusler.
“It had got to late in the afternoon, we finished what we had to do for the day. Dave and I went back to our hotel to have some dinner. There was no sign of a problem. I’d called Mike Gordon [Fenway Sports Group president] and said the last little things would be put to bed the next day.
“The following morning, and I’ll never forget this, I was in my room getting ready to go back to the stadium, brushing my teeth, when Dave rang me: ‘They have sold him to Chelsea – it’s in the news.’ I was gobsmacked. We called [Heusler] repeatedly, but he wouldn’t reply. We went back home, absolutely furious.
“They eventually got back to us and told us Chelsea had made an offer that they couldn’t refuse, but we weren’t even given a chance to negotiate. I can’t tell you how angry and devastated everyone was. I said to them: ‘Why did you not call us? We hadn’t even left the hotel!’
“There was a lot of talk back then about our ‘transfer committee’ and how it worked with signing players, but everyone wanted Mo: the owners, Brendan Rodgers [then manager], the scouts. We all felt it was a great decision, he fitted our profile perfectly and we were desperate to do it, but the rug was pulled from under us.”
Ayre adds: “It was later said to me the main reason Chelsea had taken him was so we couldn’t sign him. I was told José Mourinho was right behind the idea as he didn’t want Liverpool to have him. It all felt very weird because, honestly, there was never an indication, at any stage, that he was going to anyone else.”
They were furious but they weren’t put off. When he was moved from Chelsea to Florence, Edwards had specifically told his recruitment team to “keep on Salah” and there were special assignments to go and watch him in training camps for both Fiorentina and Roma.
The idea was to get a sense of what he was like around a group, how he behaved, the areas in which he could improve. He consistently scored highly; they got another chance to watch him closely when Liverpool played Roma in a pre-season friendly in St Louis in August 2016, and again he sparkled.