​Mohamed Salah joined Trabzonspor in the Turkish Super Lig this summer after a storied stint at Liverpool.Photograph: Huseyin Yavuz/Dia Photo/APMohamed Salah plays in Turkey now. So do Romelu Lukaku and Leandro Trossard and Leroy Sané and Nathan Aké. Mason Greenwood and N’Golo Kanté and Dusan Vlahovic, too.Bruno Fernandes and Gabriel Martinelli may yet follow them there, depending on negotiations and moods and whatever else compels a footballer to leave one club for another.Victor Osimhen, one of the world’s highest-rated strikers, was already at Galatasaray, where he has hammered in 43 league goals in two seasons, plus this campaign’s opener.Salah, the Super Lig’s signature signing, will reportedly earn about as much at Trabzonspor as he did with Liverpool last season, where he was one of the Premier League’s highest earners – on account of the net salary structure in Turkey.Related: How Trabzonspor shocked Turkish rivals to make Mohamed Salah their Black Sea saviourAs the Saudi Pro League, which flooded the game with billions in cash when it lured Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar in 2023, scales back its ambitions, the Turkish league has stepped into the void. A flurry of investment by its four biggest clubs – Galatasaray, Fenerbahce, Besiktas and Trabzonspor – is remaking it into the new moneyed destination league for the game’s ageing and the underplayed and the overpaid and the overvalued. Or perhaps they’ve made a series of savvy signings; we’ll soon find out.Unlike in previous spending sprees by leagues seeking to claim a more prominent spot in the transfer market ecosystem, the Super Lig doesn’t seem to have benefited from massive investment from a soft-power nation-building project or the sudden interest of oligarchs. Rather – and it’s all slightly confounding – it appears to have more to do with the collapse of the Turkish lira relative to the euro, which went from trading at €0.10 half a decade ago to about €0.018 today. While their clubs pay their players in lira, revenue from European competition and foreign broadcasts is paid out in euros. The long and short of it is that the big four Turkish clubs can now afford players they previously couldn’t because they can write down more of their earnings on their balance sheets.As such, Turkey joins an increasingly long line of unconventional homes for some of the game’s biggest names. Every few years, some new league invests heavily in hopes of finding a shortcut into the firmament of the world’s best-regarded competitions. Before Saudi Arabia, it was China, where it was the stated objective of President Xi Jinping and his government to leverage the sport as “a must to build China into a sports powerhouse as part of the Chinese dream”. Eventually, Chinese soccer awoke from that dream with a start.Before that, it was the Russian Premier League, when sanctioned oil billionaire Suleyman Kerimov bought Anzhi Makhachkala and plowed in hundreds of million