Merseyside club ready to trigger £58m release clause for Portuguese forward in January

One of the Premier League’s two Merseyside clubs has told the representatives of a 23-year-old Portuguese forward that it is prepared to pay his full £58m release clause in January, in what would be the most expensive mid-season signing in the club’s history.

The player, who has scored 11 goals in 14 league and European games for his Lisbon club this season, has a clause that can be activated only in a transfer window and only in full. The Merseyside club’s sporting director has been in Lisbon twice since the start of September and, according to two people with knowledge of the talks, has made clear the club will not attempt to negotiate the fee downwards, a tactic that failed with the same Portuguese club two summers ago.

“They learned their lesson last time,” said one intermediary involved in the discussions. “They tried to be clever with a structured deal and the player went to Spain instead. This time the message is: the money is there, the clause is the clause, tell us when.”

The personal terms are understood to be largely agreed: a five-and-a-half-year contract worth about £140,000 a week, rising with appearances, and a commitment that the player will be used centrally rather than on the left, where his Portuguese club has deployed him since August. The Premier League club’s manager, who has used four different strikers in nine league games, is said to regard the deal as the priority of the window.

The news came on the day the Football Association published its annual figures for payments to intermediaries, which showed Premier League clubs paid £476m in agents’ fees in the 12 months to February 2026, up 9% on the previous year and the highest total recorded. Championship clubs paid £71m. The club pursuing the Portuguese forward paid £32m, the third-highest in the top flight.

“Every year these numbers go up and every year the same people say it cannot go on,” said Fiona Grant, a sports lawyer at a Manchester firm who advises several clubs. “The cap on agents’ fees that Fifa tried to introduce is still tied up in the courts in Europe and clubs have simply stopped waiting for it. If you want the player in January, you pay the agent what the agent wants.”

Any January deal would also need to satisfy the league’s profit and sustainability rules. The Merseyside club posted a pre-tax loss of £41m in its most recent accounts but sold two academy players for a combined £47m in the summer, which counts as pure profit under the rules. A club source said the deal had been “stress-tested against every scenario” and would not require further sales.

The player himself has said nothing publicly. His Lisbon club’s president told Portuguese radio last week that “nobody is for sale, but everybody has a price written in their contract, and that is not my decision”. In the circumstances, it was taken as a yes.