The final chapter of Chelsea’s Salah-drama with Fiorentina has been written

Mohamed Salah hasn’t played a single minute for Chelsea since January 2015, but he had been making regular headlines thanks to all brouhaha surrounding his loan moves to Fiorentina and then to AS Roma the following summer.

And then last week he made headlines for a very different reason, returning to try his luck in the Premier League again, this time with Liverpool.

In the meantime, did anyone even bother to ask Fiorentina for their permission?

That’s the last time we get to make that joke, after the CAS appeals court handed down their decision on Fiorentina’s claims for €30m in damages and “development fees” for what they felt was an contract breach by Salah when he moved from Florence to Rome two years ago. Fiorentina claimed at the time that they had an addition year option on Salah, whom they already had on loan for the second half of 2014-15. Salah said they didn’t. Chelsea were stuck in the middle while Roma laughed all the way to bank.

In the end, after plenty of threats and complaints and petulance, Salah moved to Roma on loan (before converting that to a permanent move) and Fiorentina took their complaints to FIFA. FIFA rejected them last June. Fiorentina then appealed and now, twelve months later, that’s been rejected as well. And that should, finally, be that.

“CAS has dismissed the appeal and confirmed the decision issued by the FIFA dispute resolution chamber on May 26, 2016 (FIFA DRC) in which Fiorentina's claim for compensation of Euros 32 million was rejected.”

“The CAS panel found that the player did not breach the employment agreement by returning to Chelsea FC after June 30, 2015 and that Chelsea FC did not induce the player to terminate the employment agreement without just cause.”

“Accordingly, it dismissed the appeal and confirmed the FIFA DRC decision.”

-source: Football Italia

The last episode of the Salah-days of Our Lives wouldn’t be complete with a few dramatic parting words from Chelsea however.

“Chelsea’s position throughout this case was that Fiorentina had acted in bad faith in bringing a claim which was totally unfounded.”

“We are pleased that the CAS panel came to the same conclusion, with Fiorentina's case rejected in full and costs awarded to Chelsea and the player.”

“We look forward to the full decision being published so that everyone can see the lengths that Fiorentina were prepared to go to in order to extort large sums of money from Chelsea and the player.”

-source: Evening Standard

Extortion! Oh my.

Alas, this probably won’t help our potential pursuit of Federico Bernardeschi.