Blues boss Gary O’Neil says he can see Sammie Szmodics moving on in the next few days with talks having been ongoing with Derby County, where the Irish international was on loan in the second half of last season.

Szmodics, 30, hasn’t featured in pre-season for Town, although that may be as much down to a niggle as his impending departure.

Derby boss John Eustace said at the end of last season that he’d like Szmodics to join the Rams permanently having previously worked with him at Blackburn prior to his summer-of-2024 £9 million move to the Blues.

Derby are understood to be looking to pay an initial £2 million rising to £4 million but with other Championship clubs also believed to be interested, although links with Birmingham City have been dismissed.

“I can see something happening with Szmods,” O’Neil said when asked about the forward. “He’s been been a fantastic servant for the club, top guy, but there’s a few bits going on.

“Szmods has had a bit of a sore knee, but I can see in the next few days that potentially Szmods will move.”

Reflecting on the size of the squad with six players signed and more additions still to come, O’Neil added: “We have a lot of numbers at the moment and we’re really unbalanced. Hirsty’s obviously not played as much tonight as we would like and then there’s other midfielders who are getting more minutes because we’re short in midfield.

“The balance isn’t perfect at the moment, but we’ve done our best to give everyone a fair crack and we’re all training together, there’s no separate groups, there’s no people not getting involved in the shape and the understanding, everyone knows what they’re doing, so we’re doing our best to balance a lot of players.

“And I think they’re all having a fair crack and you know how football works, not everyone who’s here tonight is going to end up at Ipswich come the close of the window, we have too many. We’re going to add more, so there will be people that go out, that’s the nature of the business.

“And I think it’s really important that everyone understands we’re trying to make this place better. I know it was in the Premier League a couple of years ago, weren’t as competitive as everyone would have liked, so we need to be really aggressive in what we try and do this year.

“We need to get as much quality in as we can, we need to push the level of the ones that we have and see if we can if we can cause a few ripples with a big boys in the Premier League.”

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