The Italian champions Lazio said yesterday they had agreed to make Hernan Crespo the world's most expensive footballer in a deal worth £36m.
The Rome club are to give Parma two midfielders, Argentina's Matias Almeyda and Portugal's Sergio Conceicao, plus 35bn lire (£12m), in exchange for Crespo, who scored 22 goals last season.
All told, the deal is valued at 110 billion lire (£36m). That would beat the record fee of £31m which Internazionale paid Lazio for another striker, Christian Vieri a year ago.
Lazio have already signed another Argentine forward, Claudio Lopez, from Valencia.
Meanwhile Lazio's owner, Sergio Cragnotti, has dismissed suggestions that his side could be stripped of their first Serie A title for 26 years.
Cragnotti and the club's midfielder Sebastian Veron are under investigation over the validity of the Argentine player's Italian citizenship.
The inquiry could lead to the pair being charged with forgery but Cragnotti insists that the club is innocent, pointing out that Lazio did not handle Veron's naturalisation. "They want to take the title from us? They can do everything," he said. "I am not worried."
Veron had applied for Italian citizenship last autumn so that he might be exempt from an Italian football federation ruling banning a team from fielding more than three non-EU players in a match. He believed his maternal great-great-grandmother had emigrated from Calabria to Argentina in the early 1920s.
The Rome public prosecutor Silverio Piro, however, alleges that papers were forged to prove Veron's Calabrian origins. Last weekend Piro indicated that in October he will apply to a judge to have Veron, Cragnotti and other Lazio officials tried on forgery charges.
If the documentation were to prove false, Lazio would have broken the rules in at least 19 Serie A games last season when Veron played alongside three non-EU players.
Zlatko Zahovic, Slovenia's impressive midfielder in Euro 2000, has signed for Spain's Champions League finalists Valencia in a £6m move from Olympiakos of Greece.
World's most expensive footballers
Hernan Crespo £36m
Parma-Lazio, July 2000
Christian Vieri £31m
Lazio-Internazionale, 1999
Nicolas Anelka £23m Arsenal-Real Madrid, 1999
Denilson £22m
Sao Paulo-Betis, 1997
Rivaldo £19m
Deportivo-Barcelona, 1997
Christian Vieri £17m
Atletico Madrid-Lazio, 1998
Ronaldo £16.8m
Barcelona-Internazionale, 1997
Andrei Shevchenko £15.7m
Dynamo Kiev-Milan, 1999
Vincenzo Montella £15.3m Sampdoria-Roma, 1999
Alan Shearer £15m Blackburn-Newcastle, 1996