The Athletic. Welcome to the Athletic Football Podcast. I'm Ian Irving. A little later on our

Italian football writer James Horncastle will join us to discuss his brilliant

peace on the redemption of A.C. Milan, with maybe a lesson or two in there for some of our top English clubs.

But first, the athletics Adam Crafton and David Ornstein are with us to discuss the summer transfer window that's just about starting to

sizzle.

Let's begin then with Liverpool and David, they've agreed a big fee, it sounds like, with

Ben Fika to sign striker Darwin Nunez what's the detail behind this?

Yeah it's a done deal it's not formally announced yet by Liverpool at the time of

recording anyway Benfica have released a statement overnight and it's confirming that the fee will be

a guaranteed 75 million euros and then there will be add-ons to take this to a deal worth around a hundred million euros.

That's something we've reported for the last week or so.

The key thing here was that Liverpool and Benfica needed to arrange a structure of payments and exactly how the

split would occur it seems it's going to be 75 million euros down payment and then

the 25 in add-ons will comprise some individual related bonuses to Darwin-Newenez's performance at

Liverpool and then some team-related bonuses as well, contingent on how well Liverpool do with him in the side in the coming years.

They've got this done pretty swiftly and efficiently and managed to get a player that a lot of other

clubs were in for as well but not necessarily

at that price.

And it's a big moment too for the incoming sporting director Julian Ward who's overseen

this deal, Mike Gordon, who's the sort of link to the ownership,

the ownership themselves because they are financing this because it could be balanced out

that transfer fee by sales. It comes down to the salary really and I think that's a key area of

...