Mohamed Salah, Kevin De Bruyne and knowing when to say goodbye to ageing stars

For almost a decade, he has been one of the brightest stars in the Premier League's glittering firmament. He is one of the finest players of his generation; he has certainly been the most creative, the most decisive. And yet he is a few months from being allowed to walk away for nothing.

His most recent contract, the one that is likely the richest English soccer has ever seen, expires in June. His club does not seem to be in any hurry to arrange a new one. It appears that Kevin De Bruyne of Manchester City is more out than in.

He is not the only one. Where De Bruyne has been notably unemotional about the absence of talks for a new deal, forward Mohamed Salah has taken a different tack with Liverpool.

His approach has taken flight on multiple platforms. His first intervention on the subject, in September, was delivered live on television. He moved to social media for the second, after a victory against Brighton; the third came via an unusual appearance in front of print reporters in a parking lot.

For all the cosmetic differences, the situations share a common core. Soccer has a curious ability to produce coincidences that look like intelligent design.

De Bruyne and Salah share a Premier League origin story: spotted, signed and prematurely discarded by Chelsea, every honor in their remarkable careers acting as a tacit rebuke to José Mourinho.

Their arcs may converge, once more, at their end. Salah is 32, De Bruyne a year older. They are among the highest-paid players in the league. When fit, the two possess a talent that remains undimmed. They retain the capacity to bend games to their will. Neither has shown signs of imminent decline.

But Salah and De Bruyne are only human. Sooner or later, they will begin to fade. That leaves their clubs in a quandary. Ushering a modern icon out the door is unfathomable, but Liverpool and Manchester City know that at some point the sun is going to set. And they do not want to find themselves paying $19 million a year for the privilege of watching it happen.

Soccer has always struggled with the conundrum of what to do with players as they reach their twilight years. In his book "How to Win the Premier League," Ian Graham, Liverpool's former director of research, notes that players' salaries tend to peak at age 29. By the time they reach Salah and De Bruyne's age, they are largely at their peak earning potential.

The problem, of course, is that performance tends to track in the opposite direction. Aging is an individual thing; how long a player might last is defined by factors so specific that it is intensely difficult to predict. Wayne Rooney played his last Champions League game in 2016. Luka Modric played his most recent Champions League game last Wednesday. Modric is just one month older than Rooney.

Most clubs, though, hew to the maxim that it is better for "players' legs to go on someone else's watch."

Occasionally, that manifests in what is probably closer to guidelines than actual rules. In 2009, Manchester United decided to no longer commit substantial fees for players older than 26. This being United, it did not last. In his latter years at Arsenal, Arsène Wenger determined he would offer only one-year contract extensions to players older than 32. Except when he didn't.

Even those clubs that do not feel the need to spell it out tend to prioritize youth, to sign players with at least some consideration of how much value they might retain as they mature.

Chelsea has spent eye-watering sums building the youngest squad in the Premier League in the past two years: Only one of the players signed under the club's current owners was older than 25 -- and that was the free transfer of Tosin Adarabioyo. Liverpool has paid a fee for a player older than 27 only twice in the last nine years. Tottenham last did so in 2020.

The effect has been pronounced: Last season, only 117 players in their 30s played in the Premier League, the lowest figure since 2008. As England's clubs have become suffused with data, the conclusion has been reached that it is, at heart, a young man's game.

If this makes sense from a financial perspective, it is less obvious if it is rational from a sporting one. Some researchers have found that while players older than 30 decline physically, they continue to perform their technical-tactical functions to the same level and might even improve.

Anecdotally, Karim Benzema, Robert Lewandowski, Olivier Giroud -- and, obviously, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi -- continued to thrive well into their mid-30s, and even later. Given the advances in nutrition, conditioning and recovery, that should not be a surprise.

This, then, is the knot for Liverpool and Manchester City to untie. Convention says one thing; science might indicate another. Some of that might apply to Salah and De Bruyne, or all of it, or none of it. They are both at the peak of their financial powers; they are most likely both past the peak of their physical ones. Quite how far down that slope the two have traveled is impossible to know for sure.

Liverpool has, at least once before, tried to map out what the autumn of Salah's career might look like. It is probably doing so again.

The factors that might have gone into that assessment are not conclusive. He has avoided serious injury for much of his career, but he has been an explosive sort of player, the kind that should feel the effects of age more keenly. But his time at Liverpool has included several long, grueling seasons. There are no neat conclusions.

From the outside, of course, it feels as if all of this falls somewhere between obfuscation and irrelevance. "The fans love me and I love the fans," Salah said in that car park in Southampton, England. Salah has been pivotal in Liverpool's blistering start to the season. He is performing, by some metrics, as well as ever. The fans would pay him whatever he demands. That the club does not take the same view is a source of increasing frustration. Should De Bruyne begin to lift City from its slump, it is fair to assume the Etihad would react in the same way.

There is, though, a duality to all clubs. They are expected to be both vessels of enormous emotion and clearheaded businesses. At times, those two aspects dovetail seamlessly. At others, they act as a source of friction, the tension between the heart and the head.

It would be wrong to say Liverpool's motives are purely financial. The club had the opportunity to sell Salah last summer, with a year left on his contract, to Saudi Arabia. They chose not to. The fact that Salah's agent, Ramy Abbas Issa, is engaged in talks with Liverpool indicates the club would like him to stay.

But there is a calculation to be made, just as there will be for Manchester City once De Bruyne decides the time is right to discuss his future. When the Belgian signed his last contract, in 2021, he recruited a data analytics company to provide him with concrete evidence of his value to the team. That will not be possible this time; neither he nor City can be sure what sort of veteran he will be. Every player ages. But every player, too, ages only once.

The players, like the fans, are inclined to live in the moment, to assume that tomorrow will look very much like today. The clubs cannot do that. The only thing they know is that offering Salah or De Bruyne a new contract is to go against their better judgment and to invest in decline. What they have to decide is just how much they are prepared to gamble.