Key clause in Norwich City's £14m Borja Sainz sale revealed | OneFootball

Sainz is heading for Portugal after a fee for the 24-year-old was agreed with the Canaries.

Borja Sainz is edging closer to officially completing his £14.25 million move to Porto.

It has felt like an inevitability that the Spaniard, who has one year left on his deal with Norwich City, would move on from Carrow Road at some point this summer.

Following the initially rejected bids that both Porto and Napoli made for the 24-year-old, it was expected that they would return with improved offers for the 18-goal forward. They did, and it won't be before long that Sainz is confirmed as a new member of the Liga Portugal outfit.

It was reported on Tuesday that Norwich had agreed to sell the attacker to Porto for £14.25 million by the BBC. Their initial offer to City was £12.7 million, a price that the Championship club's sporting director, Ben Knapper, said did not meet their valuation of their top scorer from last season.

Key clause in Borja Sainz, Porto move revealed

Knapper did add that Norwich have a history of getting good money for their players. This practice will be a very familiar one to the club's supporters, who witnessed the departures of Jonathan Rowe and Gabriel Sara last summer.

While the Canaries only agreed to sell Sainz for an added £1.55 million on top of what they previously considered to not be worth selling the Spaniard for, they have notched an extra bonus in their deal with the former Champions League winners. The Pink Un have reported that Norwich have a 20 per cent sell-on clause in the deal that will see Sainz head back to continental Europe.

Their own sale of the 24-year-old means that they are reportedly obligated to send £215,000 the way of Athletic Bilbao, the club that the forward formerly represented at youth level.

Bilbao wanted to acquire Sainz if their star winger Nico Williams left them this summer, but he signed a new deal last week which ended their interest in the Canaries' man.

Norwich are right to sell Borja Sainz

The contract situation of the Basque native and the slump that he suffered in the second half of last season combined to leave Norwich in a situation where they had to consider offers for Sainz.

As talented as he proved himself to be up until Christmas last season, the consistency, although it would have been a herculian effort to stretch that purple patch across the rest of the campaign, wasn't there.

Norwich could not be fully confident that he was ever going to be this valuable again, and that has meant that they had to set him free, but not without good reason.