This clause appears to be inserted in hope, rather than any sense of it actually being activated.
Football clubs often include sell-on clauses when transferring a player. When Barnsley sold John Stones to Everton for £3m they reportedly included a sell-on clause that guaranteed them between 15-20% of the defender’s next transfer fee.
The Championship side landed between seven and nine million pounds following Stones’ transfer to Manchester City for £47.5m.
Liverpool would be lucky to get between £7 and £9 from this clause included in Mario Balotelli’s free transfer to Nice, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Mario Balotelli creatively hits back after Jamie Carragher insult https://t.co/lGqjCyWggZ
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) September 3, 2016
According to Mark Ogden, the chief football correspondent for The Independent, Liverpool insisted on a 30 percent sell-on clause in the deal with the French club.
So if Balotelli moves for £16m (stop laughing), the cost of his transfer from AC Milan to Liverpool, the club would be in-line to receive £4.8.
However, there’s two issues with any such scenario occurring. Firstly, Balotelli has signed a one-year deal with Nice, so he would therefore need to play well enough to earn a new deal, and then well enough to get a transfer to another club for Liverpool to earn anything from the clause.
There’s also the issue of Balotelli being Balotelli. The 26-year-old has been shipped out of his last few clubs, scored only one league goal for Liverpool and hasn’t put a decent run of games together in a very long time.
There weren’t many clubs prepared to sign him when he was available on a free transfer, so barring a dramatic upturn in form, the chances of a club shelling out a transfer fee on the player anytime soon appear very remote.
Still, at least Liverpool covered themselves in some way by including the clause, and the main thing, from their point of view, was getting the striker off their wage bill.
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