Jamie Carragher is wrong: Mohamed Salah & Trent Alexander-Arnold aren't to blame for contract distractions - Liverpool's incompetence is the real reason for lack of clarity over star players' futures

Liverpool ended 2024 top of not only the Premier League but also the Champions League - and yet they didn't even get to fully enjoy New Year's Eve.

Just a few hours before the clock struck 12 on December 31, Real Madrid made their move for Alexander-Arnold, prompting predictable panic among the club's supporters.

Sooner or later, one way or another, Florentino Perez nearly always gets what he wants (the dreadfully drawn-out Kylian Mbappe saga is a case in point) and it's clear that the president of the most powerful club in football is desperate to sign Liverpool's homegrown hero, who now has less than six months left on his current contract.

The Reds haven't given up hope of holding onto Alexander-Arnold but it now feels as if they're fighting a losing battle. Of course, there's no way they'd even consider losing such an important player at this stage of the season but a free transfer looks like a formality.

Michael Owen knows all about leaving Liverpool for Madrid and he is no longer in any doubt that Alexander-Arnold is bound for the Santiago Bernabeu this summer.

"The very fact that Real Madrid have now made their intentions clear towards signing Trent Alexander Arnold leads me to believe that it's only a matter of time before he signs for them," the former England international wrote on X.

"If he was going to sign a contract extension, Madrid wouldn't have officially made their move. Secretive talks will have taken place. Huge news."

One of Owen's former team-mates, Jamie Carragher, is just as convinced that the formal New Year's Eve approach to sign Alexander-Arnold during the winter window was all part of the plan.

"I love Trent as a lad [and] a player," the defender-turned-pundit posted on X, "but his team would've told Real Madrid to bid [and] also would've known [Liverpool] would turn it down. It's to try to cover themselves when he leaves for free."

Carragher's appraisal of Alexander-Arnold and Madrid's motives certainly seems spot on, and he was also right to point out that "The most important thing for [Liverpool] in 2025 is winning the Premier League. No-one's contract or future should come in the way of that!"

It's also true that the transfer talk is "something the club/fans don't need with a huge game coming up" on Sunday.

However, the implication that the club deserves as much sympathy right now as the supporters is ludicrous. Liverpool definitely didn't "need" this distraction - but they did allow it to happen.

As if anyone needs reminding, Alexander-Arnold is not an isolated case at Anfield. Liverpool don't just have one key player in a position to sign a pre-contract agreement with an overseas club - they have three. And that's not unfortunate, it's unforgivable.

Let's be honest, if United actually had any players of the calibre of Alexander-Arnold, Salah and Virgil van Dijk and allowed them to enter free agency territory, a combination of INEOS and the Glazers would be getting absolutely slated by supporters and the media right now.

So, why should FSG, Michael Edwards and sporting director Richard Hughes be given a pass, particularly after a summer in which only one new face arrived at the club? It's not as if a contingency plan is in place to deal with the potential loss of three men who were utterly integral to the club winning a sixth Champions League, in 2019, and a first English title for 30 years the following season.

It's bizarre, then, that an extremely well-informed pundit like Carragher and many others within the press have attempted to portray the players - and their representatives - as the problem here.

When Salah first went public with his frustration over the lack of progress over a new deal, Carragher labelled the Egyptian "selfish", accusing him of thinking only of himself "and not the football club".

But Salah's contract is expiring and he clearly wants to stay. At 32 years of age, is he not entitled to think about his future and push for a new deal? Hasn't he already done enough for Liverpool to deserve an extension? Loyalty should be a two-way street at the end of the day.

Granted, in an ideal world, none of this would be played out in the media but football is a murky business populated by people motivated by making as much money as possible. Pursuing individual interests is very much a part of a team game, and arguably always has been. Did Liverpool really think, then, that the three players' representatives would be happy to let the negotiations play out on the club's terms?

Furthermore, their contractual situations had been a constant topic of debate even before Salah became the first to speak out, while it's also worth noting that Alexander-Arnold - just like Van Dijk - has been true to his word in that he's still said nothing remotely inflammatory to the press about his particular predicament.

Carragher, though, has devoted more column inches and airtime appealing to Alexander-Arnold's sense of belonging in the hope of convincing him to reject Real's advances, than addressing the real root of the problem - the club's lack of foresight, which can be attributed to the recent disruption behind the scenes at Anfield caused by the departure of a succession of influential figures.

It's been reported that Alexander-Arnold and his advisors planned this all along, that he only signed on for four years rather than six in 2021 because he wanted to be in a position to leave on a free in 2025.

But if the press knew that, why didn't Liverpool? Or if they did, why not cash in on one of their most valuable assets last summer - or make it known that he intended to run down his contract?

The window of opportunity has also closed in terms of selling Salah and it's staggering to think that Liverpool have found themselves in a position where they could lose the best player in the world right now for absolutely nothing.

What exactly were they waiting for? Salah is now playing so well that the pressure is now all on Liverpool to give him exactly what he wants anyway. What have they achieved by allowing the renewal talks to drag on?

They've effectively backed themselves into a corner, because if Salah were to leave now, the fan backlash would be bitter, brutal - and completely justified.

The bottom line is that through a combination of silence, inaction and incompetence, Liverpool have long since lost complete control of the narrative.

Nobody within the club has said or done anything to appease increasingly anxious supporters. And nobody has shed any light on the club's strategy, paving the way for a torrent of transfer talk that could do serious damage during the second half of the season.

There's a very real risk of things turning toxic at Anfield, with the keyboard warriors already out in full force, sufficiently emboldened by the criticism of Alexander-Arnold coming from high-profile pundits to label a bona-fide homegrown hero a "rat", a "snake" and much worse, while Slot was once again forced to deal with questions over the future of his first-choice right-back in his pre-match press conference.

It all just feels so undeserved and so unnecessary. Slot and his players have put themselves in a fantastic position to win the league but whereas the New Year should be starting solely with hope and excitement, there's also an undeniable sense of fear and frustration that this most promising of campaigns might fall apart.

If it does, Liverpool will only have themselves to blame.