Juventus are in fact bringing in a striker on Deadline Day this year. It just won’t be the Frenchman that the club has been trying secure the signing of for pretty much the entire summer.
Instead, it will be a deal that feels like it’s gotten done with a snap of the fingers in comparison.
Randal Kolo Muani won’t be a Juventus player this season and probably beyond that as he heads to the Premier League to sign with Tottenham rather than back to Serie A like he had his heart set on all summer long.
Instead, Juventus’ alternative pick for Kolo Muani, RB Leipzig striker Loïs Openda, will be the man in his mid-2os who will sign on the dotted line with the Bianconeri on this final day of the summer transfer window. Openda, who faced Juve in the Champions League last season and was the other half of the ill-fated Bremer challenge that saw his knee go the way it isn’t supposed to, will arrive on loan with an option to buy, with that option turning into an obligation under certain circumstances.
The total package for Openda is expected to be in the neighborhood of €40 million, a stark difference from the potential €60 million we’ve heard Paris Saint-Germain wanted for Kolo Muani regardless of how the deal was structured.
Openda, like fellow Deadline Day signee Edon Zhegrova, arrived for his medical at J Medical on Monday morning ahead of securing his move to Juve before the summer transfer window closes.
The pivot to Openda developed rather quickly — and even more a quick kind of strike as compared to everything that we’ve heard with Juventus and their negotiations with PSG for Kolo Muani. Every few days it felt like the conditions — and espeically the price — changed and something prevented it from actually getting done. And, at some point, you could totally understand why Juve general manager Damien Comolli reached his end point of hoping something would get done with the European champions and went in a different direction.
With Openda, Juve are certainly getting a talented player. But are they getting the version of Openda from his first season with RB Leipzig when he scored 24 goals in the Bundesliga? Or are they going to get the one from last season when he didn’t come close to replicating those kinds of numbers and didn’t even hit double digits in the Bundesliga?
That’s the big question — and also how Juventus manager Igor Tudor is going to use him. We’ll have to wait a couple of weeks for that considering we are now in the first day of the September international break. But, as the Kolo Muani deal stalled out and he subsequently quickly moved to Tottenham, Comolli quickly found an alternative to a player who was clearly his top choice.
