Dodo resigns for Sampdoria on permanent deal

With less than a fortnight left until the transfer window shuts, Inter have finally managed to complete a sale they had already laid the foundations for over a month ago. As of Thursday afternoon Dodo is no longer nerazzurro, as the Brazilian fullback has officially resigned for Sampdoria after spending the second half of last season on loan there - this time however on a permanent basis.

Initially it looked as if this transfer would be completed very quickly, once Sampdoria gave up on their request to take him on loan again and accepted Inter's conditions (either sign him outright or forget about it), but after the two clubs had agreed on a complex deal worth around €5m things began to slow down. First Dodo wasn't keen to give his OK as he wanted to see if there were any better options on the table for him (Milan and Porto were two fanciful but fleeting suggestions); then newly appointed Doria boss Marco Giampaolo expressed his own doubts over how useful the player could be to him, and then Inter went on tour to the States and had their heads turned by rather more important matters (with all due respect for poor Dodo) - Mancini, Icardi, Candreva, you know the drill.

For one reason or another, a deal that seemed all but certain kept getting hold up - but following Lorenzo de Silvestri's move to Torino, all the pieces of the jigsaw have fallen into place and we can say goodbye to a player that quite clearly had no future at Inter. He is already present at the Blucerchiati's Bogliasco training ground, a place he knows very well indeed from the beginning of 2016.

The deal is a two-year loan with an obligatory purchase clause in 2018, which should be in the region of €5m, while the Gazzetta dello Sport believe that Inter will reserve a small percentage of any future sale for the player. Whatever the fee, I think we can consider ourselves fortunate that Samp have agreed to take Dodo off our hands and give us some money in the process. He was one of the five or six surplus players that the club decided they would try to sell back at the start of the summer, because neither with Mancini nor De Boer would he have been afforded much playing time, so this was a deal that needed to be struck. Thank goodness it finally has been.