Peterborough United chairman Darragh MacAnthony has revealed the fee Rovers paid for Sam Szmodics this summer.

MacAnthony stated that £1.8m was the agreed figure, plus performance-related add-ons, with Rovers having made five bids throughout the course of the summer for the forward.

Szmodics scored on his Rovers debut at Swansea City, having signed following the opening day win over QPR, and has made six appearances in all for the club.

Rovers director of football Gregg Broughton outlined that Szmodics was one of Rovers’ top targets of the summer, with the club eventually getting the deal over the line at the start of last month.

While the deal was announced as undisclosed when Szmodics joined on an initial three-year deal, reports had suggested the cost was worth £2.5m. But MacAnthony revealed in an episode of his Hard Truth podcast, the initial fee for the Republic of Ireland international was £1.8m.

Bristol City were owed £500,000 following the £1m deal that took him to Posh in 2020, while the Robins also secured a piece of the £1.8m transfer fee due to a sell-on clause.

MacAnthony explained: "You go through the Szmodics deal. First off, he wanted to go and he will tell you that himself. He was (coming up) 27 and this was his chance to get a good payday.

"He'd been really, really good for us.

“Bear in mind in January when Darren (Ferguson) didn't want him at the time, the best offer we had on the table was a loan deal with Oxford.

"I stopped that loan deal, and the reason I stopped that was because my biggest fear was that if he went to Oxford and he wasn't playing well and he ended up on the bench then he's worthless in the summer.

"Grant (McCann) came in and he played his best football for the last seven or eight games.

“Suddenly we go from a player worth nothing in January to the summer where Blackburn wanted him. They wanted him all summer and they made five bids in total.

“To be fair to the player and his agent, with the first few offers they were cool because they understood they weren’t great.

“Then when the bids were better, and it’s not a dig at them, at that stage the player is saying ‘you’re stopping me getting a really good move to a really good football club on more money’.

"The problem was that there was no other club that could compete so I could inch the deal up.

“We were prepared in May to say that Sammie will probably go in the summer, he was our highest paid player and it would help with the (financial) hole we have. That’s the truth and Grant understood that.

“The problem with the deal was nobody has money to pay upfront. The Blackburn deal wasn't £2.5m, it was £1.8m plus add-ons.

“We still owed Bristol City £500,000. When I brought Szmodics it was £1m over four years.

“If you sell a player and you still owe a club, the first thing that happens is that club has to get paid back. So there's £500,000 straight away.

“There was no massive windfall of money like everyone thinks.”

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