It turns out Liverpool didn’t actually pay £7m for Tiago Ilori, if the increasingly infamous footballleaks page is to be believed.
They’ve published the intricate details of many transfers involving Spanish and Portuguese clubs and there have been no objections that there substantiations are wrong.
And with Ilori, it appears Liverpool actually paid just €4.8m for the former Sporting youngster, which translates as £3.6m, with the rest of the fee only included after certain clauses were met.
Here’s the break down:
€1,880,000 upon Ilori’s registration to play Liverpool
€3,000,000 by July 2014 (note: we signed Ilori in August 2013)
Total transfer fee = €4.88m
After 15 Liverpool apps = €500,000
After 30 Liverpool apps = €500,000
After 45 Liverpool apps = €500,000
Total performance bonus = €1.5m
There were also some added on clauses, including a totally bizarre one aimed at their Portuguese rivals!
Future transfer:
Sporting receive 25% of any profit made on a future transfer
Liverpool will notify sporting of any accepted transfer bids to allow Sporting a chance to match the transfer bid
Clauses:
Liverpool shall not transfer Ilori to Benfica, Porto or Braga unless they receive an offer of €60m. If this should happens, Sporting would receive 50% of the transfer fee. (This clause expires in September 2018)
So if Ilori developed into the world’s best centre-back, we wouldn’t be able to sell him to a Portuguese rival of Sporting’s… Unless they paid a gargantuan €60m – and in that case – Sporting would get half of it anyway!
That’s one way of making sure your young prodigy doesn’t come back to bite you, we guess!
The revelations actually go some way to explaining why Liverpool were so happy to continually loan Ilori out – as he was actually purchased as a promising youngster and not a £7m centre-half – as we were previously led to believe.
The 22-year-old only recently made his Liverpool debut, playing both the away leg and the home replay of the FA Cup tie with Exeter – in which he did reasonably well.
With Klopp bringing in Steven Caulker on loan though, it looks unlikely that he’ll have much of a future at Anfield – with Martin Skrtel and Dejan Lovren to come back into the reckoning soon.
Meaning it’s unlikely his performance related clauses will ever bet met, and especially not the €60m sell-on one!