Where Turkish clubs found this money

He is not the outlier. Romelu Lukaku has gone to Fenerbahçe. Mason Greenwood, Leandro Trossard, Nathan Aké and Dušan Vlahović have all moved to Turkish clubs in the same window.

Five years ago that list would have read as a joke. It is now a transfer market.

The money is not new, but the direction is

Turkish clubs have always spent. What has changed is who they are outbidding. A decade ago Fenerbahçe and Galatasaray signed players European clubs had finished with. This window they have signed players European clubs still wanted, and paid enough that the players said yes.

Flagside reported on 3 August that a Salah move to Trabzonspor read as a rumour out of nowhere. Six days later it was a pursuit with structure behind it. Today it is a signed contract. That progression — dismissed, then credible, then done — has repeated across the league all summer.

Where the money actually comes from

Four things, and only the first is unusual.

Broadcast money that goes further at home than abroad. The Süper Lig's domestic rights are worth a fraction of the Premier League's in euro terms. But Turkish clubs pay most of their costs in lira and only a share in euros, and a league that fills stadiums every week has a revenue base that does not depend on selling to foreign broadcasters.

Sponsorship that is not only sponsorship. The biggest Turkish clubs are membership associations with enormous voting bases and deep ties to domestic business. A shirt deal is rarely just a shirt deal, and the sums attached have risen faster than the football economics alone would explain.

Contracts structured to look smaller than they are. Signing fees, image rights and back-loaded payments do more work in Turkish deals than in most European ones. A headline salary is the part that reaches the press.

Tax. This is the quiet one. A player negotiates what lands in his account, and the gap between what a club spends and what he receives is narrower in Turkey than in England, Spain or Italy. The same money out of the club becomes a bigger number for the player.

Why a player says yes

The honest answer is that Saudi Arabia changed what a late-career move is allowed to look like. Once the Pro League made it ordinary for a player still near the top of the game to leave Europe for money, the stigma stopped doing its work — and Turkey is closer, the football is watched, and the Champions League is reachable in a way it is not from Jeddah.

For Salah there is one more thing. Trabzonspor is not buying a name to fill a stadium. It is a club that has spent years trying to prove it belongs in the same conversation as the Istanbul three, and it has just done something none of them managed this summer.

What to watch

Whether this holds depends on something the transfer coverage does not answer: what happens when the first of these contracts has to be renewed rather than signed. Turkish clubs have a long history of spending ahead of revenue and then restructuring. The signings are real. The question is whether the wage bill behind them is.

Arsenal's record deal for Gabriel Martinelli collapsed this week when the player rejected Galatasaray. That is the other half of the story, and worth remembering when the next name is announced: Turkish clubs are now in rooms with players who can still say no.