It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that Liverpool would have won the 2013-14 Premier League title had they landed their main January transfer target that season.The player in question was none other than Mohamed Salah, who ended up completing a move from FC Basel to Chelsea.Liverpool boss Brendan Rodgers desperately wanted to add the Egyptian forward to his ranks but the transfer committee at Anfield refused to increase their valuation of the player, which was lower than the £12 million that Chelsea spent.Asked how Liverpool decided on their valuation of the winger, Rodgers told reporters at the time: "That's for the money guys to say that. It's the construction of the whole deal, not only with the player and the agent but also Basel as a football club. It was deemed in this case that we couldn't do a deal and Chelsea could. So the boy has gone there.“We can identify the players that we want to bring in and we hope we can get them in. If we can the club will do everything possible to match the value of the player. If they end up going to another club that is difficult to take. But you can't worry about it, you've just got to keep looking forward.”Liverpool ended up missing out on the Premier League title that season by two points.Would Salah have made the difference? It’s possible, although he wasn’t anywhere near as consistent as he is today.
Indeed, he only managed to make 19 appearances in total for the Blues before being sold to AS Roma.Salah would eventually end up joining the Reds in 2017 and has been better than anybody could have imagined during his first season-and-a-half at Anfield.The 26-year-old has scored an impressive 52 goals in 69 games for the Reds and is now widely regarded as one of Europe’s best forwards.However, following the news of Salah’s decision to join Chelsea, Liverpool fans on social media quickly turned their attention to another potential signing: a certain Xherdan Shaqiri.The Switzerland international was in an out of the team at Bayern Munich at the time and Reds’ fans on Twitter firmly believed at the time that the stocky attacking midfielder was a better player than Salah.Here are just a few tweets showing Liverpool fans were all on the same wavelength about the two players…
Like Salah, Shaqiri would also eventually end up at Anfield, completing a £13.5 million move from Stoke City in the summer.
The two attacking players are now teammates and Liverpool fans couldn’t be happier with both to them.
However, it’s unlikely that many - if any - supporters still believe that Shaqiri is better than Salah.