Pearce: Liverpool Still Working Toward New Sadio Mane Contract

Over the summer, Liverpool made it a priority to renew the contracts of their impressive strike force, first getting Roberto Firmino to put pen to paper, then accomplishing the same feat with Mohamed Salah. The club were openly optimistic about making it three-for-three with Sadio Mane, but those rumors have gone quiet for the past several months.

However, just yesterday James Pearce addressed this issue in The Echo:

Sadio Mane is under contract until 2021. Liverpool made it clear towards the end of last season that they would be willing to reward his progress with a new long-term deal and preliminary talks were opened.

Clearly, those discussions have yet to reach a conclusion but Liverpool don’t seem overly concerned about the situation. Mane is clearly happy at Anfield and the Reds have a good relationship with his agent Bjorn Bezemer.

Mane might be happy at Liverpool, but he and his agent have at the very least been open to the idea of a big move to Real Madrid. As he saw first hand last year with the Philippe Coutinho situation, a long-term contract certainly complicates any potential big moves down the road.

The Senegalese international has certainly earned a pay bump, especially the way he has started this season. The 26-year-old is joint-top at the club with the struggling Mohamed Salah with 7 goals in all competitions.

It’s not urgent to sign him up right now, but he’ll have less than two years left on his contract after this season, at which point the club will have far less leverage if a certain Spanish giant comes sniffing around. So the sooner he signs a blank sheet of paper for a photo op, the better.