Liverpool could sign their next Mohamed Salah from Brighton – but it may cost them £100m

There have many different disappointments in Liverpool’s squad so far this season, but for all the immensity of the money spent on underwhelming new arrivals, perhaps the biggest worry is the form of Mohamed Salah. Perhaps Liverpool’s greatest player of the Premier League era and the driving force behind last season’s title win has looked a little lost.

His form began to decline towards the end of the 2024/25 season, but in the context of his extraordinary performances before that, it was widely assumed that the 33-year-old would be back to his best by the time the new campaign started. Instead, Salah has looked ponderous. That could be why Liverpool are allegedly looking for his successor.

A few transfer rumours have been floating around linking Liverpool with a bid for a new winger in 2026, but among the most intriguing is a story linking them with a massive deal for Brighton & Hove Albion’s Yankuba Minteh. But is that a story that’s likely to prove true, and would Minteh really tick enough boxes to be worth £100m, as the stories suggest?

Could Yankuba Minteh be Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah replacement?

Regardless of whether Salah’s struggles are treated as an extend blip or as a simple mark of his decline, there is little doubt that Liverpool will be looking for long-term replacements. The only questions are whether they want to sign one sooner rather than later – and whether Minteh might be one of the options.

Reports in the African media have recently suggested that Minteh is a future transfer target for Arne Slot’s side, and could command a fee of as much as £100m – less than two years after Brighton signed him for an initial fee of around £30m. The story’s flames have been fanned further by comments made by former Gambia manager Tom Saintfiet – reported by the Liverpool Echo among others - who acknowledged that he too had heard the rumours making the rounds, and thought it a “possibility” that his former charge could make such a move.

Saintfiet may or may not have a meaningful inside track, but Minteh fits the profile in many ways – he’s got an impressive combination of technical quality, pace, work ethic and youth and has improved noticeably since making the move to the Amex Stadium at the start of last season.

Nobody in the Premier League has completed more successful dribbles into the opposing penalty area in the 2025/26 season and only Erling Haaland has had more touches inside the box. He clearly isn’t quite as sharp of a finisher as the Norwegian – he only has one league goal from 2.0xG - but his dribbling skill, speed and knack for finding space are making him an increasingly penetrative player down the wing.

He's also improving the quality of his final ball (he has three assists to his name already this season) and has become considerably more effective when pressing opposing defenders or tracking back since he first signed for the Seagulls. When he first joined, he was ineffective out of possession, but now he makes more tackles and forces more turnovers than almost any other winger in the top flight.

Minteh’s biggest issue remains his consistency. He has games when he tears opposing defences to pieces, and others where nothing he tries seems to come off, with the 4-2 defeat to Manchester United providing a suitably vivid example. All players have bad days, but Minteh’s can be especially frustrating.

It’s debatable as to whether he looks like a £100m player right now, or a winger who could instantly step into Salah’s shoes. There is little evidence that he will ever score in the same kind of volume as the Egyptian, and for that kind of cash one imagines that Liverpool will want a player who promises to hit double figures more often than not. Minteh did manage that in the Eredivisie for Feyenoord in the 2023/24 season, but has not looked liable to do so in the Premier League. Minteh promises to be a hugely impressive player down the line, but a direct replacement for Salah may be a stretch.

Will Liverpool really sign Minteh next year?

The primary source for the story about Minteh’s future – at least in print – appears to be a website called Footy Africa, the reliability of which is hard to gauge. The real question is whether Saintfiet was responding to a story he’s heard himself from trustworthy sources, or whether he had simply heard it on the grapevine with the rest of the world.

There is every chance that the story is simply a fiction, but between Minteh’s improving performances at the top level and the face that Slot has coached the 21-year-old before with impressive results, it isn’t necessarily implausible – even if the claim of a £100m transfer fee, which seems to spring from Footy Africa’s minds alone and is not corroborated elsewhere, seems a little unlikely.

Liverpool have spent more than £100m twice this summer alone, but those were both for players with bigger names and a longer track record of proven productivity. Minteh is still close to the start of an apparent upward curve, and Liverpool have not proven to be the kind of team who looks to spend big on young players in the way that Chelsea, for instance, so often do.

Slot was Feyenoord manager when Minteh spent the season there on loan from Newcastle, and the Gambian scored 11 goals and provided five assists under the Dutchman’s tutelage. It seems reasonable to suggest that Slot would rate Minteh highly and want to explore the possibility of bringing him to Anfield at some stage (assuming he remains in his post for long enough) but a £100m deal which effectively forced him to get close to Salah’s levels instantly or be declared a bust would surely be hard to swing with the club’s boardroom and recruitment team.

There’s no reason to believe that Liverpool aren’t at least keeping an eye on Minteh, but this story may well be rather premature. Minteh could be a £100m player one day, but he needs to become more consistent and more lethal in front of goal to live up to that kind of price tag. Perhaps that will happen quickly enough that Liverpool take a gamble next summer. More likely, Minteh – who is under contract at the Amex until 2029 – stays on the south coast a little longer.