Middlesbrough will pocket a tidy bonus if Martin Braithwaite leaves Leganes.

The Denmark international has been strongly linked with a shock £16.65m move to Barcelona this month.

And Boro have confirmed that they inserted a sell-on clause into the terms of the deal when he joined Leganes in the summer for an undisclosed fee believed to be in the region of £4m-£5m.

Braithwaite joined Middlesbrough from Toulouse in July 2017 for a reported £9m fee.

His time on Teesside didn’t go smoothly and it featured a half-season loan to Bordeaux and another to Leganes before he left for good in July last summer.

There was also a much-publicised war of words with Tony Pulis.

If Boro do receive a sell-on fee - which could be anywhere from 10% to 25% - they will have gone a long way towards recouping the cash they spent on Braithwaite’s initial transfer fee.

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The windfall could be anywhere between £1.65m up to £4.16m depending on the size of the clause. That will boost the club's transfer kitty ahead of a crucial summer of recruitment.

Barcelona have been given permission to sign a player outside the January window because they’ve been able to prove that Ousmane Dembele is injured and unavailable for selection for five months.

It looks like the 28-year-old Dane is high up on their list of targets and deal could be thrashed out inside the 15-day deadline the Catalan giants must work within.

(Image: Simon Moore/Focus Images Ltd)

Leganes will lose their player if Barca meet his €20m (£16.65m) release clause. A further kick in the teeth is the fact that they will be unable to replace their prize asset.

Jonathan Woodgate both coached and, briefly, managed Braithwaite and was asked about his time at the club during his pre-match press conference at Rockliffe Park.

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“I like Martin as a player, I thought he was a really good player and I would have liked to keep him but he wanted to leave,” he said.

“What I’ll say about Martin is, in that pre-season he came in and trained really well, fantastically well in fact. He played the Hartlepool game and went to Austria and trained really well. He’s a really talented player, it just didn’t click for him.”