Mohamed Salah's Transfer to Trabzonspor: A New Chapter Begins

Mohamed Salah’s Liverpool era is over. Not with a parade, not with a final flourish at Anfield, but with a quiet flight to the Black Sea and a number on his back that tells you exactly where he has landed.

The Egyptian forward has arrived in Turkey to complete a free transfer to Trabzonspor, ending a glittering nine-year spell on Merseyside and stepping onto the same path once taken by Daniel Sturridge.

From Anfield icon to Black Sea gamble

Salah is yet to pass his medical or put pen to paper, but his presence in Turkey signals the inevitable. He had options. Besiktas asked the question. Al-Ittihad circled with their Saudi millions. There was interest from Italy, too.

He chose Trabzon.

This is not Istanbul’s glare or the Saudi gold rush. Trabzonspor finished third in the Super Lig last season and now stand two qualifying rounds away from the Europa League in the 2026/27 campaign. It is a club that lives off intensity and identity rather than sheer financial muscle.

For Salah, 34 and coming off his most difficult Liverpool campaign, it is a reset rather than a retirement tour.

Walking the Sturridge road

His destination carries a familiar echo at Anfield. Sturridge made this move first.

The former Liverpool striker signed a three-year deal with Trabzonspor in 2019 and arrived with his own history of big moments and bigger expectations. For a brief spell, it worked. Seven goals in 16 appearances hinted at a late-career revival, a striker rediscovering his touch far from the Premier League spotlight.

Then it unraveled.

Club and player agreed to terminate his contract early, cutting short his Turkish chapter before it ever felt fully written. Sturridge’s career had already been shaped, and scarred, by fitness problems. Trabzonspor became another short stop on a journey that had once promised so much.

His route had taken him from Manchester City to Chelsea, then on loan to Bolton, before his peak years at Liverpool and a stint at West Brom. At Anfield, he scored 67 goals in 160 games and forged that devastating partnership with Luis Suarez, a duo that once dragged Liverpool to the brink of a title.

After Turkey came Perth Glory in the A-League for 2021/22. Another false dawn. Injuries delayed his first training session until November; a groin problem in February wrecked what was left of the season. He started just once, made six appearances, and did not score. Perth chief executive Tony Pignata later called the move “disappointing”, and new manager Ruben Zadkovich released him the following June.

For Sturridge, Trabzonspor was a chapter that promised redemption and ended up as a footnote.

Salah will know that history. He will also know he is arriving with a different profile, a different durability, and a far larger legacy to protect.

A new number, a new identity

At Liverpool, Salah’s No. 11 became part of the club’s modern iconography. Shirts, murals, songs – the number and the player were inseparable.

Trabzonspor cannot offer him that. No. 11 belongs to Ozan Tufan. His national-team number, 10, is already taken by Ernest Muci.

So Salah has gone local.

The club has already released images of him in the No. 61 shirt, a number that means everything in Trabzon. It is the city’s license plate code, a badge of belonging worn with pride by locals and supporters. For an outsider to adopt it is not a marketing quirk; it is a statement of intent, a nod to the city he is about to represent.

The number carries weight there. Salah, who has spent nearly a decade as the face of Liverpool’s global reach, now steps into a community that values that symbol as much as any name on the back.

Leaving Liverpool at the low point

Salah could have stayed where he was. His Liverpool contract ran until 2027, and the club would have gladly kept one of the greatest forwards in its modern history for another season.

Instead, player and club agreed this summer was the right moment to part.

The timing is telling. Liverpool’s final campaign with Salah was his poorest in red, and the team only just squeezed into the Champions League places. The edge that once made them terrifying on the break dulled. The goals came less freely. The aura faded.

This is not the way anyone at Anfield imagined the story would end, but football rarely follows the script. Careers turn on quiet decisions in back rooms as much as on roars from the Kop.

Salah now trades that roar for the raw, fervent noise of Trabzon. He swaps a Champions League anthem he helped define for the grind of qualification rounds and a league where every away trip is a test of nerve.

Sturridge went there searching for a revival that never truly came. Salah arrives with a different question hanging over him: is this the start of his final act at the top level, or the beginning of a completely new story on the Black Sea?