Egypt Director Ibrahim Hassan Urges Mohamed Salah to Stay in Europe Rather Than Join MLS

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Egypt’s national team director, Ibrahim Hassan, publicly cautioned Mohamed Salah against joining Major League Soccer once the forward’s time at Liverpool ends, arguing that a move to the United States would push one of the game’s most recognisable players out of the sport’s main view. Hassan made the comments in late March 2026, with Salah’s Liverpool contract running down and his next destination still undecided.

Hassan’s position was direct. He said that personally he would prefer Salah to stay in Europe, and that he had heard of interest from Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich and clubs in Italy. His concern was less about the standard of MLS than about visibility: a player who spends his remaining peak years outside the Champions League and the major European leagues is watched by fewer people, discussed less, and remembered differently.

He drew the comparison explicitly with Lionel Messi, whose move to Inter Miami transformed the commercial profile of MLS while removing him from weekly competition against Europe’s strongest sides. Hassan suggested that if European offers did not materialise, the Saudi Pro League would be the better alternative, citing the presence of established names including Cristiano Ronaldo. The Saudi league has spent heavily on senior international players over the past three seasons and offers wages that few European clubs can match.

Salah’s record at Liverpool gives the argument its weight. Across nine years at Anfield he won two Premier League titles and a Champions League, and became the club’s defining attacking player of the era as well as the most prominent Egyptian and Arab footballer of his generation. The question of where he plays next carries significance in Egypt well beyond the sporting merits, which is part of why a national team official felt able to comment on it at all.

There is a counter-argument to the visibility case. Salah’s global following is not tied to a broadcast slot, and players who have moved to North America have found audiences through social platforms rather than through European television rights. Messi’s move demonstrated that a single signing can shift a league’s commercial position, and the players who follow such a move inherit a larger stage than the one their predecessors joined.

Not everyone agreed with Hassan. Mohamed Mansour, the Egyptian-British businessman who owns San Diego FC, welcomed the idea of Salah joining his club and described him as an asset to any team, while stopping short of confirming any active recruitment. Mansour said he took pride in the forward’s achievements and noted the extent to which his performances hold the attention of the whole country, adding that decisions on signings rest with the club’s sporting director and head coach rather than with the ownership.

MLS itself has made its interest plain. Commissioner Don Garber has said he would like to see Salah in the league, though whether any club would commit to the salary and roster mechanics required was a separate question, and none had been reported as making a concrete approach. The league’s designated player rules and salary structures constrain how such deals are assembled, and a signing of that scale typically requires a club with both the budget and the intent to build a season around one player.

Garber responded to Hassan’s remarks in the days that followed, defending the league’s competitive standing and rejecting the suggestion that a move to North America amounts to a retirement in all but name. The exchange touched a sensitivity that has followed MLS for years, as it has drawn well-known players towards the end of their careers while trying to establish that it is a destination for footballers still at their peak.

The timing of the discussion was awkward for Salah. He was sidelined by injury at the end of March and set to miss Egypt’s training camp as the squad prepared for the 2026 World Cup in North America. Egypt had beaten Saudi Arabia 4-0 in a recent friendly and were scheduled to play Spain in Barcelona, fixtures intended to sharpen a squad drawn into Group G alongside Belgium, Iran and New Zealand.

For the Egyptian federation, the interest in where Salah plays is practical as well as sentimental. A player’s club environment shapes his fitness, his match sharpness and the travel burden he carries into international windows, and a national team preparing for a World Cup has an obvious stake in all three, particularly for a forward around whom the side’s attacking play is organised.

That grouping raised its own questions. A tournament staged across the United States, Canada and Mexico, in a period of acute Middle Eastern conflict, placed Egypt and Iran in the same group and made the political backdrop impossible to separate from the football. For Egypt, whose supporters have waited a long time for sustained World Cup involvement, Salah’s fitness was the more immediate concern.

Underlying all of it is the familiar problem facing a great player in his mid-thirties. The European clubs capable of paying elite wages increasingly prefer to invest in younger squads, while Saudi and North American clubs offer money and prominence in exchange for distance from the sport’s centre. Salah has said little publicly about his intentions, and the decision, as Hassan acknowledged, is his alone to make.