Former Liverpool defender Glen Johnson has claimed that Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk may have been waiting to see how the Reds coped with the departure of Jurgen Klopp before entertaining the idea of staying at Anfield.

Alongside fellow Kop stalwart Trent Alexander-Arnold, the pair have less than six months left to run on their current contracts with the Merseysiders.

In an exclusive interview with Liverpool.com, he claimed: "Initially, it will have been [a question of] ‘who is going to be the new manager?’ Then waiting to see how well they were gonna do.



Then they’re looking around the dressing room thinking ‘well, Mo might not be here, Van Dijk might not be here’, so then they’re waiting on each other’s positions."

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Addressing why the players in question may have been reluctant to commit to new deals until after the season had started, he contended: "Then, at the same time, they are trying to protect themselves because if Arne Slot had not done such a great job now and Liverpool were sat in sixth, all three of them would probably leave.

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Former Liverpool defender Glen Johnson has given his verdict on what the three players may be thinking amid a contract stand-off with Anfield chiefs.

"Whereas now that they’re leading the league and potentially going to win it, of course the different negotiation side starts because now the players are thinking ‘well, now if we all stay we can continue doing this’."

As Johnson points out, his former club has made an impressive start to life under Arne Slot after he succeeded Klopp in the Anfield hotseat.

The one-time Chelsea man continued: "So I think there’s an awful lot of factors to it and I think the players are waiting to see if anyone is going to leave first, to see who the manager was and waiting to see how the team was doing in the league.
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