Ipswich Town chief drops encouraging Liam Delap transfer clause hint as £30m Chelsea deal nears | OneFootball

Town's talisman is set to leave the club after just one season at Portman Road.

Ipswich Town chairman Mark Ashton has suggested that the club will have a strong sell-on clause in their agreement to sell Liam Delap to Chelsea for £30 million.

All that is left to happen for the 22-year-old to complete his mega-money move to Stamford Bridge is for him to complete his medical and sign on the dotted line. Personal terms have been agreed between the player's camp and his soon-to-be new club following Chelsea's triggering of the striker's £30 million release clause, as per The Athletic.

Delap's impressive first season in the Premier League saw him find the back of the net a dozen times, although it wasn't enough to keep the Tractor Boys up. Their relegation then activated the relegation clause in his contract which would allow any team to purchase him for the fee that Chelsea are set to pay.

It's a decent return on investment for Ipswich. They bought Delap from Manchester City, whose academy the centre-forward came through, for £15 million, plus up to £5 million in add-ons, last summer. As part of that deal, they will reportedly receive 30% of the profit that Town make on Delap in the Chelsea deal, which would equate to around £7-10 million in net earnings for Ipswich.

Ipswich chief hints at major future Liam Delap boost

It'll be sad for the club's supporters to see him go for a fee that is much smaller than what they could have gotten for him had the release clause not been there, given the number of top flight teams that wanted him.

Town's chairman has said that signing Delap in the first place would've been very tough if that release clause wasn't present in the deal. The positive news for Ipswich is that they may well make a bit of money down the line if the striker is a success under Enzo Maresca and ends up making another marquee move in his career.

"This football club is always protected moving forward," Ashton stated to the East Anglia Daily Times. He was then quizzed on whether there was a sell-on clause in the deal with Chelsea and, while he couldn't talk specifically about Delap due to confidentiality reasons, the chairman did suggest that they would stand to gain from any future move made by the 22-year-old.

"Again, I'm going to take the word ‘Liam’ out of it because I'll get myself into a world of trouble. But that would be a standard clause that we would negotiate into deals.

"We're not perfect, let's be really clear, but we do know what we're doing. It's frustrating because you can't tell the fan base everything. If they knew everything, trust me, they would look at it very differently. But this fan base again have been very trusting, very supportive and we will fight tooth and nail for this football club."

Ipswich may never realise the potential financial gains of Delap

The striker is set to sign a six-year deal with Chelsea, which should keep him in London until the summer of 2031. Given the length of the contract, it'll make it very hard for another club to come in and poach Delap away from the Blues in the near future, because Maresca's side could just ask for a wild figure to be paid as they would be under no pressure to sell.

It could end up being one extreme or the other for Ipswich.

Either Delap goes onto become one of the world's best and is bought in four or five years by one of the biggest clubs in the world, not to say Chelsea aren't on that list, or he never reaches his full potential with the club and Town never get the benefits of the sell-on clause that they almost certainly included in the deal.