Today is not a good day for any hardcore Liverpool FC haters. This morning, the Egyptian king that is striker Mo Salah signed another two year contract with The Reds, who are currently sitting pretty at the top of the Premier League.
Some feared he might be swapping Anfield for Saudi Arabia, ending an eight-year run at the club. But now, Salah, who has scored 27 goals this season, confirmed a decade-long hot streak at Liverpool is on the cards. But he doesn’t just reserve his elite level rizz solely for the pitch. We get it on his wrist, too.
When signing on the dotted line of his new contract, the 32-year-old wore a mighty blue ceramic Richard Mille RM17-02 to celebrate. Is it a quiet, stealthy grail? Absolutely not. It’s packed with Richard Mille craziness, with a little bit extra on top (this is a guy who posed on a throne in a stadium to announce the news).
For a start, it’s an openworked tourbillon, a type of mechanism used by high-end watch makers to counteract any inaccuracies caused by gravity. It uses loads of fancy escapements to do this, and in the case of Salah’s RM17-02, this horological madness is visible through a skeletonised design.
Openworked complexity is right up Richard Mille’s street. But unlike a lot of other watches in its line-up, this one uses a manual wind movement, packing in roughly 70 hours of power reserve. It’s effective, and crazy accurate kind of like Salah on the pitch. The RM17-02 pairs a mean looking ceramic and rose gold case with a matching blue rubber strap. And at 48.2 x 40.1 mm in size, it’s pretty hard to miss. This is a very loud, and obvious flex the kind of thing few can pull off. But when you’re a god-tier football player at a top-of-the-league club, it’s right at home.
Salah has a taste for skeletonised, ceramic grails. Just last month, he was rocking the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar Openworked (ref 26585CE.OO.1225CE.0) in Paris. Both this watch, and his RM17-02 are extremely complicated and make it known, kind of like Salah when he spoke about his difficult contract negotiations to the press. And with fellow LFC watch fiend Virgil Van Dijk also down for techy tourbillons, we reckon Salah’s recent wrist checks went down a storm in the changing rooms.
Liverpool are currently 11 points clear of Arsenal so it’s surely a case of when not if they will bag the title, which could pave the way for another round of holy wrist checks from Mo Salah. But with another 24 months at Liverpool secured, who knows, he might go for something quieter and equally complicated, like a Patek Philippe Calatrava.
