ENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE NEWS:DERRY CITY chairman Philip O'Doherty last night denied that Sunderland have made any approach to the Irish club about the possibility of buying out the "sell-on" clause included in the James McClean transfer deal last August.

City sold McClean to the English Premier League side last August for an initial fee of around €420,000 plus a variety of “add-ons”. The player’s remarkable progress at the Stadium of Light has already earned the Irish club an additional €120,000, a payment that became due when McClean made his 10th first team appearance and Sunderland will be obliged to pay the same again in the event that they manage a top-eight finish to the season with the young the winger having featured in half of their 38 games.

With eight games to play Martin O’Neill’s side are currently in eighth position and McClean has played 13 league games.

Beyond that Derry are entitled to €30,000 for each time McClean clocks up five competitive international appearances, up to a maximum of €90,000.

Potentially far more lucrative, though, is their entitlement to 15 per cent of any fee that Sunderland receive in the event that they sell the player and it is this that reports in both Sunderland and Derry suggested yesterday had been the subject of a tentative approach by the Premier League outfit.

It was suggested that Sunderland are prepared to offer around €600,000 in order to buy out this clause of the original deal but O’Doherty said last night that neither he nor any other director had been contacted so far.

A substantial offer would present the City board with a major dilemma. McClean, whose current deal at Sunderland runs until 2015, has won widespread acclaim for his performances in recent months and while it is early days for the player it is not hard to imagine that if he maintains his current career trajectory, he may be valued in excess of €12 million.

If a club was ever to pay Sunderland a fee similar to the £17 million Chelsea handed Blackburn Rovers for Damien Duff in July 2003, City would, as things stand, receive around €3 million, comfortably dwarfing anything ever collected by an Irish club in relation to a transfer involving a former player.

If, on the other hand, McClean was to simply stay at Sunderland for the rest of his career, leave at the end of a contract, suffer a major decline in form or serious injury then City could be left empty handed.

Schoolboy clubs Leicester Celtic, Lourdes Celtic and St Kevin’s Boys were entitled to five per cent between them, some €384,000, of the Duff fee while Crumlin United earned €151,000 from Robbie Keane’s switch from Leeds United to Tottenham Hotspur the previous August.

Those payments were made as part of a Fifa “solidarity” scheme that obliged big clubs to compensate clubs that had helped to develop young players although a reinterpretation of the rules later severely curtailed the circumstances in which such large sums would be paid.

Dundalk previously made a multiple of the fee they originally received from Liverpool for Steve Staunton when all of the add-ons were taken into account but others clubs have been less fortunate.

Then Cork City chairman Tom Coughlan, for instance, surrendered the “sell-on” clauses relating to Kevin Doyle and David Meyler to Reading and Sunderland respectively for far less than would have received had the Irish club got the intended cut of the roughly €8 million Wolves paid Reading for the Wexford man.

A similar clause relating to Shane Long was not sold and ended up being treated as one of the club’s assets when it was liquidated.