Report: Juventus, Paulo Dybala agree to contract extension through 2025

For months now, even before the mere thought of going weeks and weeks and weeks without football was a possibility, we’ve been hearing about Paulo Dybala working on a contract extension with Juventus. The reason why that’s such a big deal is that the final few weeks of the 2019 summer transfer window involved Juve actively seeing if they could find a team to acquire Dybala’s services.

As we know, Dybala went nowhere, rejecting moves to Manchester United and Tottenham before getting the chance to prove his worth to first-year manager Maurizio Sarri.

Now as we sit here waiting for Serie A and Juventus to come back, we might have reached the light at the end of the tunnel regarding those contract talks that we first heard about two months into the 2019-20 season.

According to a report from SportMediaset on Wednesday, Juventus and Dybala — you know, the two parties who seemed like they were going to split eight or nine months ago — have agreed to the much-talked about contract extension that will tie the 26-year-old Argentine to the club until 2025. The only thing holding up the deal being official and Dybala — whose current contract runs through 2022 — celebrating a big moment in his career, according to the report, is what you think is holding up the deal being official: coronavirus and Italy’s lockdown.

Dybala, as we know, has been battling the virus over the course of the last couple of weeks after him and his girlfriend were diagnosed with COVID-19, according to a March 21 press release from Juventus.

But before we had to worry about Dybala’s health and the well being of just about everybody in Italy, he was in the kind of form that makes him worthy of being offered a contract until 2025 — which, when signed, would be the first time a Juve player has committed to the club for that long into the future.

OK, so he’s not scoring goals at the same kind of clip that he did when he first arrived at Juventus, but Dybals’s easily been one of the Italian champions’ best players throughout the 2019-20 season. His form has gone from pretty meh in the final year of Max Allegri’s tenure in Turin to reinvigorated under Sarri’s watch despite the fact that he entered the season with a whole lot of drama attached to his name. (Not that it was all of his doing since all Dybala wanted was to just play for Juventus even though he came close to leaving.)

On the season, Dybala has contributed 7 goals and 4 assists in 24 Serie A games (17 starts). In the Champions League, has scored 3 goals and 2 assists in 7 matches this season — including THAT free kick against Atletico Madrid in the group stage.

Pretty good, right? Yeah, I think so, too.