It feels like the bulk of Juventus’ transfer dealings is centered around trying to find some clarity about the attacking group Igor Tudor will have to work with next season. It doesn’t matter if it’s somebody joining the club (Jonathan David or Jadon Sancho) or somebody almost certain to leave (Dusan Vlahovic), the rumors are constantly churning.
Then there’s somebody who is essentially stuck in the middle at the moment: Randal Kolo Muani.
Juventus have already had one bid to try and retain Kolo Muani’s services for next season rebuffed by Paris Saint-Germain. But it looks like another bid with a little bit more money on the front end is set to be submitted to the Parisian side that is currently beating up on Real Madrid in the Club World Cup semifinals as this sentence is being written. This bid, according to La Gazzetta dello Sport, will be worth an initial loan fee of €10 million with an option to buy around €40 million. That would allow PSG to not suffer a loss on a player that they invested nearly nine figures worth of a transfer fee in just two summers ago, but it’s not the kind of formula that they have been pushing for.
That’s right, you probably can guess what’s next. PSG are still fully entrenched on trying to get Juventus to make their proposed option to buy into an obligation so they know for a fact that the €40 million worth of money come next summer is a guarantee.
Is that something Juventus might be willing to do? At this point, we don’t really know for sure. We know they want to keep Kolo Muani around. We also know that Kolo Muani is plenty happy with how his first six months on loan in Turin went and would quite like to stay at the club rather than potentially going back to a roster where he is very much out of their plans and not on good terms with the coach.
But the catch is that PSG don’t want Juventus to have an option to buy and are probably hoping Kolo Muani’s willingness to stay in Turin tips things in the end.
So as much as Juve might be in a standoff of sorts with one of their current strikers, it also appears they’re in a bit of a holding pattern when it comes to see if PSG will agree to a deal that is more on their terms or if they’ll have to up things even further to get the current European champions to agree to a deal that allows Kolo Muan to stay in Serie A.
