On Saturday we covered claims from Portugal about Liverpool interest in Gelson Martins. Jurgen Klopp’s men were thrown in with Bayern Munich and Juventus as clubs seriously interested in the Sporting player.
The whole premise of the Portuguese article was that Sporting won’t sell. Gelson has a €60m buyout clause but O Jogo said that even if a club paid that then Sporting would use an additional clause they have to raise the amount to €100m.
If Liverpool or anyone else offered €60m, Sporting could pay Gelson €1.5m and increase the selling clause to €100m.
It all sounded like PR for Sporting especially because Gelson is primarily a right winger and Liverpool have the always excellent Mohamed Salah in that position.
Now another Portuguese newspaper are reporting similar. In their Sunday edition Record say, according to their own information, Gelson isn’t going anywhere in January, even if a club paid €100m.
That’s surely nonsense, because regardless of Sporting’s aims this season, it’s almost beyond belief they’d knock back €100m. Record state the release clause is only valid for a period in the summer.
Should Liverpool want to sign Gelson they’ll have to wait until the summer, when a sale will be considered around the €60m mark.
Again this feels like Sporting PR and perhaps the Portuguese press helping to set up the idea of a sale in the summer.
