OFFICIALLY OFFICIAL: Juventus announce financial details of Cristiano Ronaldo’s exit

For three days and all throughout a very interesting — and not in a good way! —weekend of football, Juventus remained quiet when it came to Cristiano Ronaldo leaving the club. Essentially all we had was Manchester United’s announcement saying that they had come to an agreement to sign Ronaldo and bring him back to Old Trafford.

Other than that, we didn’t know much.

Now, on Deadline Day, we’ve finally learned what the Ronaldo deal looks like.

Juventus announced Tuesday the details of Ronaldo’s exit, with an initial €15 million transfer fee set to be paid over five (!!!) years and another €8 million in add-ons included, pushing the total value of everything to a maximum of €23 million. From Juventus’ press release announcing the deal:

Turin, 31 August 2021 - Juventus Football Club S.p.A. announces that an agreement with Manchester United FC Ltd for the definitive disposal of the registration rights of the player Dos Santos Aveiro Cristiano Ronaldo has been reached for a consideration of € 15.0 million payable in five financial years, which might be increased, up to a maximum of € 8.0 million, upon achievement of specific performance objectives over the duration of the employment contract with the player.

This operation generates a negative economic impact of approximately € 14.0 million on the 2020/2021 financial year due to the partial write-down of the net book value of the player’s registration rights.

As you can tell, that transfer fee is nowhere near the reported €28 million figure that Juventus were hoping to get so that they wouldn’t post a loss on the books. And because of that, Juventus will be taking a pretty good hit on the 2020-21 books despite the fact that Ronaldo’s sizable salary is officially no longer their problem.

A big sticking point in negotiations late last week with Manchester City was the fact that Juventus did want a good chunk of change after Ronaldo told the Turin giants that he wanted to leave the club before the summer transfer window closed. It is because of that demand that pushed Manchester City out of negotiations, allowing United to swoop in, probably hit at a few heart strings and convince Ronaldo to come back to the club where his career took off.

For Juventus, it’s not the transfer fee that they were hoping to get, but it’s something. Getting close to €30 million obviously would have been nice, but that was seemingly impossible knowing that they didn’t have a whole lot of leverage following Ronaldo’s request to leave. They got what they got, we should be at least somewhat happy about it and now we can hopefully move on and see what they can do now that there’s one giant amount of salary no longer in play.