Juve’s Centre Back Search Is Back Where It Started

For a while there, this looked like the rare transfer that actually made sense on every level.

Juve sent Tarik Muharemovic to Sassuolo on an initial loan two years ago, back when Carnevali was still running things on the other side of that deal. Sassuolo took up their option to buy him last summer, and the fee Juve accepted for a permanent move came with a 50 percent sell-on clause attached. So when Carnevali left Sassuolo to become Juve’s CEO, he brought both a deep knowledge of the player and a built-in discount on getting him back. Not a bad position to negotiate from.

And for a stretch this summer, it looked like it was actually going to happen. Juve had upped their offer to 30m, per Romeo Agresti, with Sassuolo still calling it too low but talks described as “progressing.” The same report had Matteo Moretto saying Muharemovic had accepted a return to Turin, with Juve reportedly ready to offer a five-year deal. This was all playing out while Muharemovic was away with Bosnia at the World Cup, and when Bosnia went out in the round of 32 — a 2-0 loss to the U.S., with Weston McKennie involved — it read like the kind of result that would only speed a summer move along.

Instead the price kept climbing. OneFootball’s report on the widening gap has Sassuolo’s number moving from 30m before the tournament to 40m after it, with Juve capped at 15m — a “25m gap,” per the headline. I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it, though. Sassuolo would only net half the fee from any other club, so getting 15m from Juve is the same as 30m from someone else. Getting 20m from Juve is the same as 40m from someone else. Run the actual numbers being discussed through that math and the real gap is something like 10m, not 25m. Still a gap, just a smaller and more normal one than the headlines made it sound.

Whether that 10m gets bridged doesn’t look like Juve’s problem to solve anymore, though. That same OneFootball report, citing Luca Cilli, named Sunderland and Bournemouth as the clubs actually willing to pay closer to Sassuolo’s number, with Juve conspicuously absent from that list. And in just the last day or so, Football Italia reported that Leeds have jumped in front of the other English clubs entirely, citing Fabrizio Romano — they’ve apparently presented an actual verbal proposal to the player and are prepared to match Sassuolo’s ask outright, with Newcastle mentioned but trailing. This is fresh enough that I’d expect the exact shape of it to keep moving, but the direction feels pretty settled at this point: Muharemovic is headed to the Premier League, and it’s probably Leeds’ deal to lose.

So Juve are left with a sell-on payday coming their way and no obvious plan to spend it on the player it’s tied to. Which puts more weight on the other centre back conversation they’ve been having all along — Jhon Lucumi.

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Lucumi’s situation is almost a mirror image of Muharemovic’s. Instead of a discount Juve control, there’s a 28m release clause Juve don’t seem willing to trigger, and instead of being the only serious suitor, Juve are one name on a fairly long list that’s included Inter, Roma and Bournemouth, and Nottingham Forest at various points over the past few weeks. Lucumi himself stayed out of it while Colombia were still alive in the World Cup, telling Gazzetta it wasn’t the time to get into it and that things could be discussed properly once he’s back in Italy. Reasonable enough, given he was mid-tournament. Colombia have since been knocked out in the round of 16, on penalties to Switzerland, so that excuse is off the table and a decision presumably isn’t far off.

The interesting part here isn’t really the player — it’s what the whole sequence says about how Juve are approaching this summer at centre back. They had, in Muharemovic, about as favorable a deal as a club can construct for itself: a discount built in years in advance, a CEO who personally engineered it, a player reportedly willing to come back. And once the price moved against them, they walked rather than stretch for it. That’s either encouraging discipline or a missed opportunity depending on how the defense resolves by the end of the transfer window, and right now it’s genuinely unclear which one it’ll turn out to be. Lucumi is the next name on the list, per the reporting, but he’s not the only alternative out there, and Juve don’t look positioned to force his deal either, not with this many other clubs circling and a release clause they haven’t shown much appetite to pay. So the practical outcome of all this maneuvering might just be that Juve enter August still needing a centre back, having talked themselves out of the one deal that was actually built to their advantage.

We’ll see how the sell-on money actually gets used. That part, at least, is still very much open.