Cherubini confirms Dybala contract talks will take place ‘in the next few days’

With the calendar officially flipping to March, that means Juventus has less than three months remaining in the 2021-22 season. And because Juve’s numerous free agents-to-be will see their contracts run out at the end of June, that’s less than four months to go before they’re officially not Juventus players anymore unless something happens.

We’ve heard contract talks between the club and those soon-to-be free agents were set to happen in February, but we never really received reporting from the Italian media that stated they actually did. Now, as we hit March, the window appears to be closing, and that means talks are bound to happen soon.

Juventus Director of Football Federico Cherubini confirmed Thursday that talks with the representatives of biggest of those impending free agents, Paulo Dybala, will take place “in the coming days.” Same goes for the other free agents like Juan Cuadrado and Federico Bernardeschi who will see their contracts expire at the end of June, but it’s very much Dybala that is the headliner knowing full well what the negotiations have been like over the last couple of months, let alone the last year or more.

Who knows what these upcoming talks will yield, especially with the difficulty that has been the last few meetings between Dybala’s agent, Jorge Antun, and Juventus’ front office. It’s hard to believe that the contract talks have stretched over this long of an amount of time, with so many reports over the last (insert random number here) amount of months either suggesting that there’s been significant progress made or even a deal being struck.

As far as we know, the framework of the deal that would have paid Dybala as much as €10 million net per season isn’t there anymore. Since that point where it looked like Dybala had some sort of agreement on a new deal, we’ve heard a report from Tuttosport that Juventus — most notably CEO Maurizio Arrivabene — want all of the players with expiring deals at the end of the season to take a paycut of 15 percent if they want to stay in Turin. That, obviously, is moving in the opposite direction of what Dybala has wanted with his contract extension, which proved to kick off the latest amount of rumors about where he might go if Juventus don’t agree to a new deal with their current No. 10.

Juve’s stance, at least publicly, has been that they’re still open to talking with Dybala and the rest of the players who are out of contract in June. Some seem more logical than others, and there’s a chance that we see every single one of them back next season. But for now, the biggest deal will be what comes out of the meeting with Antun because of what kind of conditions Dybala’s negotiations have been like over the last year. Maybe, just maybe, there’s some progress. Like, for real this time.