Julian Draxler-to-Juventus talk dominated our lives a summer ago. As we know, there was no actual part of that stuff coming to fruition, and instead Beppe Marotta had to seek a deadline day deal for Hernanes, a wonderful waste of €11 million if there ever was one. It was drawn out in the same kind of fashion that Paul Pogba's rumored move to Manchester United has this summer.
Basically, transfer sagas are annoying.
But, because of what Draxler has come out and declared in German sports outlet Bild, another summer of Draxler being on the move could potentially be happening. And, naturally, Juventus has been thrown into the group of teams vying for the 23-year-old's services. According to Sport Mediaset — so take that for what it's worth right there — that Juventus are going back to the Draxler well in an attempt to bring the German midfielder to Juventus once and for all. The conditions of the deal? Well, that involves Marotta pulling an old friend out of his bag of tricks — loan with some kind of option to buy.
First, how we've gotten to this point. This is what Draxler had to say on Tuesday:
"The situation with me is that I made it clear to (head coach) Dieter Hecking after we were knocked out of Euro 2016 in the semi-final that I would like to leave Wolfsburg.
"The coach has known about this for three weeks. It's very surprising that they have been talking about me to the media for weeks.
"I would have expected things to be different, for example for one of them to come to me and ask me how things are with me."
Draxler, one of Germany's brightest young talents, has already been linked to a host of big European clubs since the quotes became public. There's talk of Real Madrid being interested. There's talk of Arsenal being interested. There's talk of Liverpool being interested. You probably get the picture by now.
While I highly doubt that Draxler-to-Juventus makes any kind of headway compared to what happened last summer, it's funny to see this happening now after seeing everything take place last summer. The Schalke-Juve negotiations faded away quietly into the night and Draxler got his big-money move to Wolfsburg instead. Now, that paycheck is looking like it can't buy all of Julian's happiness. I wonder if he wants to hit the reset button and try things all over again when it comes to the summer of 2015. Just a thought.