Amid the small matter of a Premier League title challenge, last season’s Liverpool news was dominated by the fate of the three key players approaching the end of their contracts.

If you had told those of a Liverpool persuasion that they would keep two out of three, your premonition would have been met with positivity. The two that remained – Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk – have become bona fide Liverpool legends since their arrivals in 2017 and 2018.

By the time they finally signed their latest Liverpool contracts, Salah and Van Dijk were both in their thirties. Nevertheless, the club handed them two of the most lucrative contracts that have ever been gifted to Premier League players.

Salah’s deal is said to be worth ￡400,000 per week, with another ￡100,000 in bonuses. Van Dijk reportedly earns ￡350,000 per week, with another ￡50,000 in bonuses. The only consolation is that clearly not too many bonus measures have been met.

They are the second and third highest-paid players in the Premier League, behind only Erling Haaland, the player who scored a hat-trick against Liverpool in the FA Cup quarter-final on Saturday.

In contrast, Salah and Van Dijk are nowhere close to providing good value for money compared to the generous investment made by the club.

Liverpool and Salah have already decided to go their separate ways this summer after what is almost certain to be the lowest-scoring season of his spell with the club. It’s a decision they could even have made in January after?thatinterview.

For Van Dijk, there will be one more year of contract remaining at Anfield. Guilty of giving a penalty away against City, it would take some redemption arc for him to rediscover form worthy of the league’s best-paid defender.

So did Liverpool make a mistake giving those flashy contracts to Salah and Van Dijk in the first place?

When they were on course to winning the Premier League, there was little reason not to keep two of their key players. But giving themthosesalaries exudes a sense of short-termism, not forecasting the inevitable declines of two players far nearer the end of their careers than the start. And Liverpool are now paying a hefty price.

That’s not to say Salah and Van Dijk are solely to blame for their feeble title defence. Their performance levels have dropped this season, but so have some of their teammates. New signings haven’t had the impact expected of them; their manager has struggled to find an effective formula.

But the two renewals now look like costly mistakes, with echoes of when Arsenal gave lucrative new contracts to Mesut Ozil and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang before having to rip up those new deals after their deterioration and inevitable inability to attract any buyers.

Ozil and Aubameyang were brilliant when at their best, but Arsenal reached a point where they were starting to hold them back and they had to move on.

Liverpool themselves will now let Salah move to a new club for free in the summer, nearly three years after rejecting a ￡150m package from Al-Ittihad. For the last year of his contract, they will have spent more than ￡20m on his wages, while spending more than ￡18m on Van Dijk’s. Their best player this season, Dominik Szoboszlai, has cost them about a third of Van Dijk.

It’s hard to look at Liverpool’s renewals of Salah and Van Dijk and not think they got something wrong. Keeping them wasn’t the mistake; giving them those terms absolutely was. It’s the kind of schoolboy error we expect of Manchester United, not Liverpool.

There have been bigger wastes of money in football. Expensive signings who flopped, players on big salaries who became injury prone. The business Liverpool conducted for Salah and Van Dijk – all before a summer in which they broke their transfer record twice – was not the worst ever witnessed, but there should certainly be questions asked as Liverpool stare at a ￡39m cost for a rotten double of a season.

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