Portsmouth have signed defender Aji Alese on loan from Premier League side Sunderland.<\/p>\n
The 25-year-old joins Pompey for the rest of the season having only played twice this campaign in Premier League 2 after recovering from a broken leg.<\/p>\n
London-born Alese, an England Under-20 international, signed for Sunderland in 2022 from West Ham United, having come up through the Hammers’ academy.<\/p>\n
“He’s a strong defender who is also comfortable on the ball and has experience of playing Championship football,” Portsmouth manager John Mousinho told the club website.<\/p>\n
“We are short on centre-backs at the moment and he exactly fits the profile of what we have been looking for.”<\/p>\n
Since his arrival in the north east, he has made 46 appearances for the Black Cats, scoring once.<\/p>\n
His last first-team appearance before breaking his leg came in January 2025, one of 12 Championship games he featured in last season as Sunderland went on to win promotion to the Premier League via the play-offs. <\/p>\n
“Aji has been incredibly patient and worked diligently to prepare himself for this next opportunity,” Sunderland’s sporting director Kristjaan Speakman said.<\/p>\n
“The Championship is a league he’s familiar with, and this move is the ideal step for him in the second half of the season.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Portsmouth have signed defender Aji Alese on loan from Premier League side Sunderland. The 25-year-old joins Pompey for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":397818,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-397817","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397817\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}