Tommy Martin: Mané's low-key business-like ending adds to his legend
LEGENDARY STATUS: Sadio Mane's Liverpool exit has been confirmed. Pic:@FCBayernEN
Given that his last act for the club was taking part in an open-top bus parade, it might seem a stretch to say that Sadio Mané left Liverpool quietly. As leaving dos go, being cheered by thousands of fans while standing on top of a double-decker beats the traditional whip-round and card in an envelope.
Still, Mané’s departure was a low-key one for a man who can reasonably be said to be one of the most important players in recent Premier League history, one who won every available trophy in his six seasons at the club.
Though heavily rumoured, it was only in the days after that consoling tour through the streets of Liverpool after defeat in the Champions League final that news of the player’s impending move to Bayern Munich became public. There was no tearful farewell, no final wave to the Kop, no valedictory speech into a microphone.
Cryptic words at a press conference while on Senegal duty were Mané’s last contribution on the subject before turning up for his medical in Germany on Tuesday. The sight of the player ambling out of a Munich hospital wearing the colours of his new club for the first time seemed in keeping with his fuss-averse nature.
Neither had the prelude to the move followed modern transfer mores. Whispers of concern had gained volume in the months leading up Mané’s decision to up sticks but they had often been expressed as an addendum to the more pressing matter of Mo Salah’s contract impasse.
Both men were in similar situations: just turned 30, marquee players in a superpower team, seeking the spectacularly renumerated dotage to which proven A-listers feel entitled. Yet it was Salah’s future that dominated headlines, his goalscoring feats making him first among equals in the public eye.
In contrast to more lurid transfer sagas, Mané’s time at Liverpool seemed to slip quietly into the night, as if he were a consultant who packed up his laptop one day and was never seen in the office again. Quotes from ‘sources’ close to player rarely adorned back pages nor was there talk of downing tools. There was no equivalent of ‘The Pogmentary’, the bizarre five-part series which commits to celluloid the end of Paul Pogba’s miserable time at Manchester United.
Endings are a part of sport – every game, season, career is a metaphor for life, inching toward an unavoidable, terminal conclusion. Teams are no different. For Liverpool there is the challenge of sustaining an era; for Mané the promise of a new beginning. The club were not prepared to pay the salary the player sought, so both parties shook hands and moved on. Liverpool timed the release of a farewell video interview to coincide with Bayern’s official announcement yesterday. Thanks were offered, memories cherished, fondness expressed.
The sensible, business-like nature of proceedings stretched to the reaction of supporters. While an amnesiac few have disowned Mané as a cash-hungry mercenary – a man who has shipped large chunks of his salary to humanitarian projects back home in Senegal – most have been measured. Trawl Anfield-centric websites and podcasts (so many, many podcasts) and the reaction has been a mix of warm appreciation for Mané and hungry anticipation for what might be next, pressing statistics for Darwin Nunez passed around like dirty magazines in a pre-internet school yard.
While Liverpool fans are sad to see Mané go, they trust the club and how does its business. They reckon boffins deep within the bowels of Anfield will have run the sums, configurated the algorithms, extrapolated the permutations and will have gotten this decision right as they have so many before. A hero Mané may well be, but this time the giant Scouse supercomputer says no.
All that said, this remains an ending. While Salah is probably the iconic Liverpool player of the Klopp era, Mané might be the player most emblematic of the manager’s overall vision. No player brought together the combination of relentless, ferocious physicality, selflessness and game-breaking ability in quite the same way. Mané has the tactical acuity to fulfil his role in a system while at the same time providing the lacerating, vicious coup de grâce.
Liverpool have thrived by running into the face of modern football’s prevailing wind, the cult of the individual, where the best players see themselves as above and distinct from their clubs, brands in themselves. Klopp, the crazy old socialist, still believes in the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, and no player expressed that better than Mané.
He is as smiley and timid off the field as he is explosive and ruthless on it. His ‘brand’, such as it was, consisted entirely of scoring goals, charging tirelessly into the faces of opponents and building schools in Senegal. He was “low maintenance, high performance and never injured,” tweeted Jamie Carragher, who described Mané as his favourite player of this era.
He is the first of Liverpool’s fabled front three to depart the club and that is an ending too. It could be that Liverpool regenerate successfully. Using their last great era as a timescale, they are now roughly at the arrival-of-Ian Rush stage of things. But it is hard to imagine what comes next being as thrilling and disruptive as Salah, Mané and Firmino were in their pomp. The end of that unique, telepathic synergy feels like it deserves to be marked with a little more fanfare too.
In a profile for written in 2019, Oliver Kay reported from Mané’s hometown of Bambali, a tiny village in rural Senegal. His uncle Ibrahim told Kay about the young Sadio’s first steps in football, leaving the village against his parents’ wishes to join an academy in the capital. “He fled Bambali,” Ibrahim laughed. “He fled in secret, without informing anyone. Walked a long, long way, and then took the bus to Dakar.”
You might say that he slipped out of Liverpool in similar style. Nothing became this legend of the club like his leaving of it.
