Curtis Jones Set to Leave Liverpool After 16 Years for £30m Inter Milan Move

Curtis Jones joined Liverpool’s academy at the age of nine. Sixteen years later, the midfielder is on the verge of leaving Anfield for good, with Inter Milan closing in on a £30m agreement that could be finalised within days.

A Deal Agreed Late on a Wednesday Night

Liverpool and Inter Milan reached an agreement for Jones late on Wednesday night, with the 25-year-old given permission to travel to Italy for a medical. The package is worth an initial £25.7m, with a further £4.3m available in add-ons, taking the total value of the deal to around £30m. A sell-on clause reported to sit at 10 percent has also been built into the agreement, entitling Liverpool to a share of any future transfer fee Inter receive if they sell Jones on.

The timing brings an end to months of speculation over Jones’ future. He entered this season in the final year of his Liverpool contract, and Inter’s interest had been building for weeks, with the Serie A club long-term admirers of the England international. Jones is the third English player to move to Inter this transfer window, following defender John Stones and full-back Djed Spence out of the Premier League and into Serie A.

From the Academy to the First Team

Jones has been at Liverpool’s academy and first team from the age of nine, working his way through every age group before making his senior debut. Across his time at the club, he made 228 appearances and scored 22 goals, establishing himself as a versatile midfield option capable of playing in a number of different roles across Liverpool’s engine room.

His most productive campaign, in terms of playing time, came last season. Jones made 49 appearances in all competitions in 2025/26, the most he has managed in a single season at the club, though only 28 of those came as part of the starting eleven. That split, closer to a squad player’s workload than a guaranteed starter’s, has been a recurring theme of his recent years at Anfield, and appears to have played a part in his willingness to explore a move away this summer.

Squeezed Out of a Rebuilt Midfield

Jones’ path back into a regular starting role at Liverpool has grown harder to see this summer. New head coach Andoni Iraola has set out plans to use Florian Wirtz in his preferred number 10 role in a 4-2-3-1 system, with Dominik Szoboszlai, Alexis Mac Allister and Ryan Gravenberch all competing for the two remaining midfield spots in front of the back four. That leaves little obvious space for Jones, a homegrown academy graduate who has spent much of the past two seasons fighting for a regular place even under Liverpool’s previous management.

A move to Inter offers Jones a route out of that congestion and into a Serie A midfield being actively rebuilt around fresh Premier League experience. Where he would have needed to leapfrog three established internationals to force his way into Iraola’s first-choice midfield, Inter can offer him a much clearer path to regular football from the moment he arrives.

Serie A’s Pull on Premier League Talent

Jones’ departure fits a wider pattern taking shape this transfer window, with a run of Premier League players making the move to Serie A. Stones and Spence have already completed their moves to Inter, and Jones’ arrival would make it three England internationals switching to the same club inside a matter of weeks, a concentration of talent moving to one Italian side that is unusual even by the standards of a busy transfer window.

For Inter, the appeal is simple to explain: Premier League experience at a competitive price relative to what similar profiles cost within Serie A itself, and a squad being rebuilt with an eye on competing on multiple fronts. For Jones, the move offers something he has found difficult to secure at Liverpool in recent seasons, a clearer path to regular first-team football, in a league that has become increasingly attractive to English players seeking regular football away from home.

Stones arrived at Inter first, bringing Premier League and Champions League winning experience from his years at the back for Manchester City and England. Spence followed soon after, giving Inter a younger, more athletic option at full-back. Jones would complete a trio that covers defence, wide areas and central midfield, each man arriving from a different Premier League club but landing at the same San Siro address inside a matter of weeks. For a club used to building squads through careful, targeted business rather than mass recruitment drives, the sudden cluster of English arrivals marks a shift in recruitment strategy as much as it does a transfer story about any one player.

What Liverpool Lose and Inter Gain

Losing a player who has been on the books from the age of nine is never an easy decision for a club to make, even when the numbers around playing time suggest the parting makes sense for both sides. Jones represents a direct academy product, one of the increasingly rare examples of a player who progressed through Liverpool’s youth ranks into a long career in the first team, rather than arriving through the transfer market.

For Inter, signing Jones adds a versatile, experienced Premier League midfielder to a squad already reshaped by the arrivals of Stones and Spence this summer. His ability to play across midfield, combined with his experience of Champions League and Premier League football at the highest level, gives the Italian club another option capable of adapting to different systems and different phases of matches.

The sell-on clause included in the deal means Liverpool retain an interest in Jones’ career even after he leaves, a common feature of modern transfer agreements that allows selling clubs to benefit if a departing player goes on to command an even larger fee at a future club.

Jones’ likely exit is one piece of a much larger reshaping of Liverpool’s squad this summer. Iraola’s arrival as head coach has come with wholesale change: Wirtz has been brought in to occupy the number 10 role at the centre of the new 4-2-3-1 system, and Araujo has joined on loan from Barcelona to add depth at centre-back. Alongside those additions, Stones and Spence have already departed for Inter, and Jones now looks set to follow them out of the exit door. Taken together, the incoming and outgoing business shows a Liverpool squad being rebuilt from the middle of the pitch outward, with academy graduates like Jones among those finding themselves squeezed out by a new manager’s vision for how the team should play.

The Next Step

With the medical now arranged, the move looks close to being finalised, bringing to an end 16 years in which Jones grew from a nine-year-old academy recruit into a first-team regular who made more than 200 appearances for one of English football’s biggest clubs. For Liverpool, his exit continues a summer in which a new head coach has reshaped both the tactical setup and the squad around him, opening a gap between the club’s long-serving homegrown players and the international signings brought in to fill Iraola’s preferred system. For Jones, at 25 and entering what should be the peak years of his career, Serie A now offers the fresh start and the regular football he has been chasing.

There is an obvious symmetry in how this transfer window is shaping up for Liverpool’s academy generation. Jones broke into the first team alongside a group of young players who came through the club’s youth ranks at a similar time, several of whom have gone on to fight for regular starts as Liverpool’s transfer business brought in higher-profile alternatives at every turn. A move to Inter changes that equation entirely for Jones. Instead of competing with Wirtz, Szoboszlai, Mac Allister and Gravenberch for a place in central midfield, he would walk into a Serie A squad that has just spent heavily on the idea that his Premier League pedigree is worth building around.

For Inter’s coaching staff, the appeal of adding Stones, Spence and potentially Jones within the same window goes beyond simply adding individual quality. It gives the club a core of players who already understand each other from years spent facing off in the Premier League and on England duty together, a familiarity that can shorten the settling-in period any new signing usually needs before a squad starts to feel like a team. Whether that logic pays off on the pitch will not be clear for months, but the business itself has already reshaped the market for English talent heading into Serie A this summer, with Jones potentially becoming the latest and most symbolic departure from a Liverpool side moving on from the era that defined much of his career at the club.

Jones’ absence from Liverpool’s squad for recent preseason friendlies against Monaco and Como had already signalled that a departure was close, with the club managing his final weeks around the training ground carefully once the two sides neared an agreement. His medical in Italy is scheduled for Friday, after which Inter can register him ahead of their next Serie A fixtures.