A problem that goes unnoticed at Juventus

The best way for teams to fund big summer moves is of course, to offload unwanted players. However, Juventus and 'selling' do not seem to go hand in hand. Thinking of all of the players that have left in the past few years and not a single GOOD sale comes to mind.

To me, this problem has been under the radar for too long. When it comes to shipping players out, we're abysmal. It's the equivalent of throwing hundreds of £50 notes at pole dancers on your night out. We're chucking cash away. Cash that is apparantly extremely difficult to come by for Italian clubs if you believe Marotta.



I started thinking about this when Melo was loaned out for a 2nd year. Let's look at some facts.


After failing to impress, Melo ended up being one of the bright sparks in our dreadful campaign.


Melo cost us approx. 25Million Euros

Melo was 27/28 when we loaned him out for free. If it's not a young prospect or a player struggling for form & fitness who could have a future with Juventus we should NOT be loaning them out at all. Period.

And when Galatasaray played hard ball with us, instead of selling Melo on, we RE-LOANED him and now we're in the same position with a player 2 years older and therefore less desirable. We're probably taking a 20M euro hit on Melo.


Let's look at recent departures from Juventus.


Amauri: Had a decent start to life at Juventus, we paid something similar to Melo's fee to get him. He went on to be loaned out. Which again is a mind boggling move. Amauri went away on loan instead of being sold for a decent price. He impressed at Parma and then we got him back only to sell him for 0.5M euros. Pennies in top league football.

Iaquinta: He was a very good player in his time, but once again instead of moving him on we've loaned him out and let him sit on the bench afterwards. Not only will he be leaving for free, he'll be taking a couple of million Euros for his time.

Motta: A pretty bad player for us. But had showed promise before Juventus and is also a young player. Now he's either been loaned out for two seasons or sold for a few thousand Euros. Enough money to pay our kitchen staff perhaps. But to aid us in the mercato? Not even close.

Krasic: 15 million Euros. Was sublime for half a season, stuttered the next. We sold him for less than half his price. No way should be have been allowed to go for under 10M at the minimum.

Diego: Contrary to popular belief, he was not a flop. He showed great promise, cost us 25M euros and went a season later for 10M less. He should have been sold for a much, much greater sum

There are more examples I may add later. But for now, it's obvious we keep buying players and selling them on for a price not too different than you'd expect from a much smaller club dealing with much smaller players. Another thing is that the likes of Matri or Quags may end up in the same boat next season if we don't move them on for a respectable price.

We have lost over 100M euros in just recent times letting players ride our reserves and get multiple loanes elsewhere instead of moving them on. This is bad for the club, very bad.

You loan the players out for free so at least you don't pay the wages...

Who the hell wants FELIPE MELO except of the fans?

yeah..their big salaries made it almost impossible to sell them.
i mean look at iaquinta...we can't get rid of him...he's on 2.5-3m/year salary and he proved he doesn't have it anymore when we loaned him at cesena
who would want him?....same thing with amauri..i don't even know how parma took him...i believe we are still paying some of his salary..

Exactly what I was thinking.. Galata are laughing their asses off now, they got a very good destroyer on his peak for free for two!! years, became one of the most important player for them, and now that he is aging they just either let him come back, or try to rip us off even more.
Amauri's case is pretty much similar. Parma got a starter striker who is doing very good for them, but still, what we manage to do? Stick with him in the squad, then his contract ran off, 0 profit, and half a year of wages for him (if I recall well)
Our selling strategy was miserable to say at least in the last few years, although we must accept it is hard to get of those players with high wages, but still we could have done a lot better.

Just imagine if we could loan Ibra for 2 years for free then send him back to PSG

dronte wrote:
Just imagine if we could loan Ibra for 2 years for free then send him back to PSG

this is the only way i would looove Ibra at Juve

Yes we have lost a lot of money on players like Diego,Krasic,Elia and Felipe Melo...some of those players really deserved a second chance,but we sold them for half price (Krasic) or loaned them out (Melo) now we risk to loose a good player like Melo for ridiculous price.
I don't like our loan deals even with our youth players.
Now we have same situation with players like Matri and Quag. both can be a new Iaquinta,Amauri deja vu.

I understand the wages were high. But they weren't exceptionally high apart from Amauri's at one point.

The truth is, we made no effort to sell them.

You make a good point and Football Italia actually wrote an opinion article on this point. I have pasted it below. I'm willing to let Marotta off the hook for most of the players he inherited because Blanc and Secco handed out high contracts to awful players and paid horrible transfer fees. It's hard to get a team to take on a bad contract and it's hard to get a player to agree to accept less money. How many of us would accept potentially a million dollar pay cut? That's a lot of money and these players' careers are short. So, I don't blame Marotta for players like Melo, Amauri, Iaquinta, etc.

But we need to cut down on the deals where we buy the player and the player has to be sold the next year, such as players like Elia and Krasic. Marotta has gotten better at buying the players Conte needs, so I think it's best to judge him on his buying and selling abilities based on last year and going forward.

Here is the article. It starts off talking about the potential sale of Vidal, but halfway through the article it discusses Marotta's inability to sell players:


Should Juventus sell Vidal?

After Juventus took Arturo Vidal off the transfer market, Antonio Labbate takes a closer look at the club’s sales policy under the rule of Beppe Marotta.

“Arturo Vidal was a smart choice by the club, while the Coach has made the most of him. It is clear that some of the biggest teams in the world are looking at him and we are not hiding that fact. But our desire is to keep him because Juventus have never been a selling club, we are an outfit that wants to continue growing to target more important trophies. And Vidal is an indispensable figure.”

Juventus director general Beppe Marotta thus made it clear that their midfielder – after links with Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich – would remain in Turin this summer. He sounded pretty categorical, but then again, what else was he going to say?

There is no doubt that Juventus want to keep their Chilean ball-winner. He’s become a vital cog in Antonio Conte’s Bianconero machine. After all, had he not been signed for what has turned out to be a bargain €10.5m in 2011, then we may never have seen the 4-3-3 and then 3-5-2 from a Coach who was initially viewed as a strict 4-4-2/4-2-4 aficionado. Vidal has been a key acquisition.

Yet it is easy to say in April that Vidal won’t leave, it may be somewhat harder if an interested club puts €20m, €25m, €30m, whatever amount on the table for him in the summer. There will undoubtedly be a figure where a desire to keep will be turned into a temptation to sell. Every player, or virtually every player, has his price.

Selling Vidal should be an option that Juve consider, but not for at least another season. Putting the clear footballing reasons to one side, you have to ponder the financial aspects. Vidal, at the age of 25, is still not at the peak of his game. As such, his market value has yet to reach its summit. Keep him in Turin for another campaign or two and watch his price tag increase. If you are going to cash in on an asset then that is the time to do it.

Marotta’s argument that Juventus are not a selling club doesn’t strictly ring true. They haven’t been under his directorship, but this is an outfit who often cashed in on high profile stars during the self sufficient days of Luciano Moggi, Antonio Giraudo and Roberto Bettega. They sold the likes of Roberto Baggio, Christian Vieri, Zinedine Zidane and Pippo Inzaghi to help finance the arrival of new players such as Gigi Buffon, Pavel Nedved, Lilian Thuram et al. They made the system work while the Agnelli family funds were used elsewhere.

More than one Juventus employee last week looked to the difference in financial strengths between themselves and Europe’s biggest when trying to explain the 4-0 aggregate defeat to Bayern Munich. But if you can’t compete in the revenue stakes, then the transfer market does offer you an avenue by selling players. Granted, that is not as simple as it sounds given that you have to do it in a way to make sure your side’s competitiveness is not negatively offset. But it is an option that should be explored.

Marotta has clearly had few problems spending money since his arrival in the summer of 2010, indeed, he’s actually spent more than Bayern in the last three years. And that is not a criticism of him or his buys, a number of whom spectacularly flopped. No transfer chief is immune to signings that don’t come off. The worrying aspect is his inability to sell players at a profit and move some unwanted individuals on, which have then had consequences on the wage bill.

In the summer of 2010, Juve spent €56m on new faces and collected €37m in sales. A year later, they shelled out a massive €85m and brought in just €14m. Last summer, €55m went out and only €17m came in. The club lost €11.5m on Milos Krasic and Eljero Elia alone. Marotta has only sold one player in Turin for over €10m and that was Diego to Wolfsburg.

La Signora also failed to get Amauri’s €3.8m salary off their wage bill until six months before his contract was set to expire, while Vincenzo Iaquinta – frozen out of the squad this term – is still the club’s third highest paid player behind Gigi Buffon and Andrea Pirlo. Add a bit more to Iaquinta’s €3m a year deal and you have a top player’s salary.

The tales of Amauri and Iaquinta illustrate that if you continually opt to reject or fail in the sales of certain players, then you run the risk of never making a return on whatever you’ve shelled out in terms of a transfer fee.

There are a few players in the present squad who may soon be contenders to be included in such a bracket. All are in attack. Mirko Vucinic, Fabio Quagliarella and Alessandro Matri roughly cost the Turin giants €15m each. The first two players are 29, the latter 28. How much would they be worth today? How much in 12 months’ time? The line graph would probably be falling south.

One of those three will surely have to be released for a decent amount at the end of the season, possibly even two depending on who else, as well as Fernando Llorente, will come in for 2013-14. And although Vucinic is clearly Conte’s first choice striker, he shouldn’t be untouchable because he’s ultimately taking up a striker role in the side despite clearly not being the most clinical finisher in the League.

Selling for the sake of selling is evidently ludicrous, but one would presume that a club such as Juventus would also understand that there does come a time when saying goodbye makes sense.

A nice read, and I agree about the part with our strikers possibly falling into the same category.


Matri and Quags need to be sold outright in the summer. No loan, no co-ownership, just get him off the books for a combined 16M Euros which seems plausible. If we have guaranteed players coming in, I would ship Giovinco out too.

AbraKebabra Alacalamb wrote:A nice read, and I agree about the part with our strikers possibly falling into the same category.


Matri and Quags need to be sold outright in the summer. No loan, no co-ownership, just get him off the books for a combined 16M Euros which seems plausible. If we have guaranteed players coming in, I would ship Giovinco out too.

Matri, Quags, and/or Giovinco are the type of players that should be used with a team like Fiorentina or Roma in a transfer deal to acquire a player like Jovetic. There is no reason this can't be done. They have reasonable contracts and will get to regularly start on those teams. That caliber of team where they belong anyways.

It's not unoticed at least not from my side its just a problem that we had and still is here from Secco's era..

DeviAngel wrote:It's not unoticed at least not from my side its just a problem that we had and still is here from Secco's era..

Marotta isn't without blame though. This summer is going to be a good test for him because he needs to purchase at least one or two new quality strikers and sell 2-3 of the current strikers that are all players that he purchased. It will be interesting to see if he is able to get any real value for Quags, Matri, or Giovinco. He failed with Matri last summer. Hopefully, that doesn't happen again.

Juventude wrote:

DeviAngel wrote:It's not unoticed at least not from my side its just a problem that we had and still is here from Secco's era..

Marotta isn't without blame though. This summer is going to be a good test for him because he needs to purchase at least one or two new quality strikers and sell 2-3 of the current strikers that are all players that he purchased. It will be interesting to see if he is able to get any real value for Quags, Matri, or Giovinco. He failed with Matri last summer. Hopefully, that doesn't happen again.

True Marotta ain't wihout blame but most of the consequences are from Secco's era. Matri was just panic buy ....