What Erling Haaland’s blockbuster new contract REALLY reveals about Manchester City’s 115 charges verdict and why it will push Mo Salah towards Liverpool exit, writes IAN HERBERT

When Everton and Nottingham Forest faced the threat of points deductions last season, you could smell the anxiety washing through the corridors of those clubs – stalked by the sudden spectre of relegation and unable to promise Premier League football to players they wanted to buy.

In the moment they announced an agreement to pay Erling Haaland a salary of £400,000 a week and rising, for a period of approaching a decade, Manchester City signalled that there is not the mildest anxiety hanging over them. Not the remotest sense that the verdict, expected within the next few months from an independent tribunal convened by the Premier League, will go against them.

The imaginative Haaland contract signing video released by City exuded self-confidence and sent a frank message to the Premier League: ‘It will be business and spending as usual here, for as long as you can imagine.’

It wasn’t just a show they were putting on. City’s owners’ belief in their own innocence is absolute. The adamance of Khaldoon Al Mubarak, their chairman, that the club’s sponsorship deal with Etihad Airlines was not artificially inflated to beat spending rules, means that if the alleged breaches of the rules are made out, it would be viewed as a travesty, to be challenged for all days.

It is possible that a clause has been written into Haaland’s new contract stipulating that, should such a Premier League conviction come and City be relegated, he can leave for a set fee.

But another of the possible outcomes – a substantial fine and moderate points reduction for City’s alleged failure to cooperate with the Premier League investigation – would still see Haaland reduced to playing in the Europa League next season.

That’s a very long way from the expectation of an individual whose friends had been convinced that it was the Bernabeu – a sun-kissed world of Jude Bellingham and Vinicius Junior – next for him. He has evidently been convinced this will not happen.

The Abu Dhabis are currently casting their gaze way into the future. They’ve secured Pep Guardiola’s services for two more years, agreed a deal to sign £67million-rated Eintracht Frankfurt striker Omar Marmoush and two new defenders for a total January outlay of £130m. And now they have blown away any notion that Haaland – who publicly flirted with Real Madrid last year – would give City a few years and be off.

The benefits of this deal are obvious and immediate. The chance to see from close quarters the further evolution of a striker whose immediate impact has exceeded that of any other player to have arrived in British football – 111 goals in 126 City games. For many continental players, the appeal of a warmer, more cosmopolitan location means stars eventually leaving Manchester. Not this one.

Persuading Haaland to stay at one club for potentially the rest of his career will have entailed vast financial enticements. The contract will probably spread his pay rises over the span of years but the notion of him earning more than £700,000 a week does not seem far-fetched, if he meets the Premier League and Champions League performance-related clauses which City will have installed. Few, if any, football agents would agree a long-term player contract that doesn’t have increments in it.

Though this is the longest deal the Premier League has known, the payments must be accounted for – amortised – over five years on City’s books, rather than the entire nine. The Premier League aligned their rules with UEFA’s on that, after Chelsea began spreading contract payments over eight years.

And how will City fund it? Through complex sponsorship deals with state-controlled companies like Etihad Airlines, which the Premier League believe they will soon rein in, but City insist they will not.

Those lacking pockets as deep as City’s are left with a renewed realisation of what they are up against the reigning champions and their Gulf wealth. ‘We know how good we have to be every single day to compete in this league,’ reflected Arne Slot, in the light of the Haaland news.

Liverpool’s owners are currently confronted with the risk of paying Mohamed Salah a fortune to extend his contract when the assumption must be that, at the age of 32, he will not be delivering at the same level two years from now.

Salah has been in extraordinary form for Liverpool and scored consistently over a far longer time in the Premier League than Haaland, but is at an age which makes longevity value very hard to predict.

City’s decision to pay Haaland so lucratively for potentially 10 seasons, and until the age of 34, strengthens Salah’s negotiating hand at a time of huge clamour among Liverpool fans for their Egyptian player to stay.

Ahead of a challenging week, with fixtures against Paris Saint-Germain and Chelsea lying in wait, the deal is a timely shot in the arm. More life affirming for this labouring club than any of the new players they may sign this month.

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He becomes the first pillar of a post-Guardiola era, with the notion that the team might be built around him. With 79 Premier League goals to his name, Haaland can allow himself to imagine eclipsing Alan Shearer’s 260-goal Premier League record and leave it as one of the greatest players the competition has known.

Such an optimistic view of the future would be harder to sustain were City to lose the ‘115’ Premier League case and – without the same legal redress though the Court of Arbitration in Sport which they successfully fought off a two-year Champions League ban imposed on them by Uefa – be forced to live with a ‘guilty’ verdict.

Buying City was a means of building global reputation and influence for Abu Dhabi. The public ignominy of being held up to censure and accused of cheating would blow that apart, creating the kind of reputational damage that they would find almost impossible to bear. It could conceivably lead the Gulf state to walk away from British football.

A Haaland deal of such mind-boggling proportions attests to the fact that they do have the remotest expectation of that. Al Mubarak’s words to Haaland at the end of City’s contract signing video felt like a statement to the wider world.

‘Erling,’ he says. ‘We are going to be together for a long, long time.’