I think for all the obvious pointing out that we've offered players past their prime contracts that are far too big. We have to remember we seem to have a lot of players that have fallen a long way from their peak almost overnight. We were clamouring for ages for Salah to sign. Even though we all saw her want the same after afcon.
I'm sure there are several reasons why this has happened and it'll be different reasons for different players. But I don't think the contracts offered seemed as bad at the time as they do now.
WHilst this is somewhat true, offering oxlade a contract extension, 18 months and 2/3 sub appearances after knee reconstruction surgery, especially when he still had 2 yrs left on current deal is very eccentric
But the fabinho one could be the worse, in late 2021, we didn't know his form would collapse, but we did know we had a team of players 29/30 and we needed to highlight the guys we wanted to keep into their 30's and the ones we didn't. And thus who you would sell or not renew to fund replacements. You have to answer the important question, what will this guy offer once his legs start to go and Fabinho out of all our recent legends was the one it is harder to give a positive answer about. He isn't presented as a leaders either, unlike some of the others, fabinho was all action, with OK technique, He was also on 100k a week, meaning he would probably look to leave and have the most suitors with those wages. All things being equal, I would have probably signed off on keeping Mo salah, a left footed wideman of his class is harder to replace well, whilst that might have been proven wrong, but doubling Fabinho's money until he was 32 didn't make sense from our financial perspective at the time