BAWLER
← All transfers
Done dealUpdated 08:51 UK · 3 Sept

Franculino to Trabzonspor
Midtjylland's top scorer joins for €17m

FC MidtjyllandFC MidtjyllandTrabzonsporTrabzonsporFee€17mReliability100%
The story so far
  1. 2 Sept
    Transfer announced
    Trabzonspor officially confirmed the signing of Franculino from FC Midtjylland for a reported €17m fee.

The move in full

The 22-year-old striker leaves FC Midtjylland as their leading scorer of the past three seasons to sign a multi-year contract with the Turkish side.

Trabzonspor have completed the signing of striker Franculino Djú from FC Midtjylland in a permanent deal reported at €17m. The Turkish club confirmed the transfer on 2 September, with Franculino signing a four-year contract that includes a club option for a further year. Turkish reports put his guaranteed salary at just over €2.1m a season, rising if that option is triggered, while the fee itself is due to be paid to Midtjylland in instalments spread over five years. Midtjylland also secured a sell-on clause worth 15% of any future transfer fee, and the deal was pushed through in time for Trabzonspor to register Franculino for this season's Europa League squad.

Trabzonspor president Ertuğrul Doğan said Franculino had been "first on our list" of transfer targets, adding that the club had signed him "on reasonable terms" and had "serious expectations" of him. The Süper Lig side have been looking for a reliable goalscorer to lead their attack, and the signing lands at an unsettled moment for the club: Trabzonspor parted ways with head coach Fatih Tekke by mutual consent the day before the announcement, following their Europa League play-off exit to Ferencváros. The recruitment appears to have been driven by the club's board rather than by a permanent head coach, with Tekke's successor yet to be named.

For Midtjylland, it's a significant loss up front. Franculino had been the Danish club's leading scorer in each of his three seasons since joining from Benfica's academy in July 2023, and he was central to their Superliga title win in 2023-24, a campaign in which he was Europe's highest-scoring teenager. The Herning club had previously turned down much larger offers to keep him, including a reported €30m bid from Al Hilal and interest from Bayern Munich, so a €17m fee — even with the sell-on clause attached — is a comparatively modest return on a player they had long insisted they didn't need to sell.

Franculino leaves as the top scorer in this season's Danish Superliga, with 16 league goals and 21 in all competitions before his exit. Across three seasons in Denmark he scored 58 goals in 117 appearances, having marked his Midtjylland debut with a goal and followed it four days later with a hat-trick in Europa Conference League qualifying. Born in Guinea-Bissau and raised in Portugal, he signed his first professional contract with Benfica in 2020 before moving to Midtjylland three years later, and he has since won caps for the Guinea-Bissau national team.

At 1.86m and left-footed, Franculino is built as a penalty-box finisher who also offers pace and athleticism to run in behind defences — attributes that should translate to a Süper Lig frontline built around service into the box. Trabzonspor will want him producing quickly given the scale of the outlay and the uncertainty already surrounding their coaching staff.

Franculino's departure leaves Midtjylland needing a new focal point up front as they continue in Europe and try to defend their recent domestic form, while Trabzonspor now carry both a club-sized investment in a young striker and the task of settling him in without a permanent head coach in the dugout.

What it does to the model

Franculino's arrival gives Trabzonspor a fresh source of goals and penalty-box threat, so Bawler's ratings for their attack will move once he actually starts featuring — what matters is the chances they create and convert with him in the side, not the fee paid. On the other side, Midtjylland lose the player who has scored more of their goals than anyone else for three seasons running, which pulls down Bawler's expectation of their strike-force until another player fills that role. Both adjustments only firm up once matches are played under the new lineups.

How this is scored100%
  • Announced by the clubs100

A sourcing score, not a chance of completion: it grades how solid the reporting behind the move is. The stage and the evidence come from the sources listed below; the arithmetic is fixed in code, the same for every deal.

Sources

Related: Trabzonspor team page · All transfersTrabzonspor — every match prediction

Where this move lands

Next up

No fixture for them inside the window we publish predictions for yet.

The rest of their windowBoth clubs, this window
More from this windowOther moves we have written up