Mohamed Salah and Nemanja Matić: Chelsea's odd couple of 2013-14

Two arrivals, two different Chelseas

January 2014 was a strange month at Stamford Bridge. On the 23rd, Chelsea announced the signing of a 21-year-old Egyptian winger from Basel for around £11 million, a player who had just tormented the Blues twice in the Champions League group stage while playing for the Swiss champions. Eight days earlier, Chelsea had confirmed the opposite kind of deal: a familiar face coming home. Nemanja Matić, sold by the club back in 2011 as part of the swap that brought David Luiz from Benfica, was returning for £21 million after winning the Primeira Liga Player of the Year award.

Salah arrived with the buzz of a player Liverpool themselves had tried to sign. Matić arrived as the polished, defensively minded product of José Mourinho's second Chelsea revolution. Both were now squad-mates under the same manager, at the same club, in the same second half of the 2013-14 season.

Diverging fortunes almost immediately

What followed showed just how differently a single dressing room can treat two talents. Matić slotted straight into Mourinho's midfield, making his second Chelsea debut days after signing and starting in a statement win at Manchester City. He would go on to become an integral part of the side, later winning two Premier League titles and a place in the PFA Team of the Year.

Salah, by contrast, struggled for minutes. Limited gametime under Mourinho eventually pushed him out on loan, first to Fiorentina and then to Roma, who signed him permanently. It was a false start that, at the time, looked like it might define his career, a talented young winger who simply couldn't break through at Chelsea while a returning defensive midfielder thrived in the same building.

Where their stories actually belong

Neither man is remembered for that Chelsea half-season, and that's precisely the point. Salah's story is Anfield's: a club-record signing in 2017 who shattered Premier League scoring records in his debut season, became Liverpool's all-time top scorer, and turned into arguably the most decorated foreign player in the competition's history. Matić's story, meanwhile, became entwined with Manchester United, following Mourinho there in 2017 and spending five seasons as the dependable, tactically disciplined presence in midfield, the anchor Mourinho trusted across three different clubs.

After Chelsea, their paths kept crossing at odd distances rather than directly: Salah went on to torment defences in Serie A with Roma before his Liverpool explosion, while Matić followed Mourinho again, first to United and eventually to Roma himself in 2022, long after Salah had left that stadium behind. Two men whose names now belong to rival red shirts of English football briefly stood in the same blue changing room, one about to be loaned out, the other about to become a title winner.

It's a reminder that a club's history isn't just about the players who make it there, it's also about the players who pass through on their way to becoming who they were always going to be somewhere else.