West Ham were not able to agree an option to buy at a fixed transfer fee at the end of the six-month loan for Joao Mario.
Although they tried to add a clause for an option to buy for between £26m to £30m Inter Milan refused to budge insisting that they wanted to recover the full £39.5m they paid with add-ons for the former Sporting Lisbon midfielder in 2016.
Reports from Italy have suggested there is no option to buy in place and a club insider today confirmed those claims are correct and no clause exists in the contract.
West Ham will pay the players full wages for the next five months until June and will pay Inter a loan fee as well a six-figure sum to the agents.
The final bill will top close to £4m but West Ham believe they would be able to strike a deal with the Italian club if Mario’s loan is successful.
In isolation it still makes sense to do this loan given the position with Lanzini. However, if he’s good he’ll go back to Milan and if he isn’t we won’t want to buy him. It does make the big fanfare on the OS hard to understand, its hardly some sort of coup to get an out of favour player to come here for 4 months is it?
Yeah the one thing is he is going to be motivated because he wants to play in the World Cup, we need a spark to keep us moving in the right direction, if he does turn out to be worth £40m we can try and buy him and pay the money they said they would pay to sign a striker, incidentally Moussa Dembele warming the benches at Celtic, we should try and get a loan to buy deal on him, a top quality young player.
Agree Dembele or Berardi would be great deals up front. Any news on Dendonker?
I read the player would not agree to any condition which gave us “first dibs” on a permanent deal as he sees his future beyond the summer with a club playing CL football. Not short of confidence is he, considering he is currently a bench warmer! Let’s see how he reacts to having the shyte kicked out of him on a cold day in Wigan shall we!