Change of plans? Atalanta now reportedly set to buy Merih Demiral outright

It wasn’t even more than a couple of days ago that most in the Italian media were reporting that Atalanta had no intentions of making Merih Demiral’s loan deal a permanent one this summer.

Ah, how things can change over the span of a couple of days on the transfer market.

According to pretty much all the heavy hitters in Italy — Gianluca Di Marzio of Sky Italia, Fabrizio Romano and Goal Italia’s Romeo Agresti amongst others — Atalanta have decided to take up the buy option to purchase Demiral outright just when it looked like the Turkish center back was heading back to Juventus. Not that he would have been a Juve player for long, with the Bianconeri likely to move him on somewhere else this summer if that had actually happened. But with Atalanta now reversing corse after a very back and forth couple of weeks, there finally seems to be a resolution to a lingering question mark on the transfer market.

I know we kinda sort said that a few days ago, but now things appear to actually be resolved.

Buying Demiral outright will cost Atalanta €20 million, with Juventus getting some much-needed transfer cash to try and upgrade the squad going forward this summer.

Well, this is quite the turn from what we were discussing on this very blog all of two days ago.

Thee were visions of Juventus potentially holding a bidding war with some Premier League teams to try and get a nice sum of money for Demiral, who had a pretty solid season with Atalanta during the 2021-22 campaign. As much as Demiral probably had visions of maybe trying to prove himself once and for all at Juve, the main reason why he went to Atalanta was because he wanted to play and play a lot. And even if he were to come back to Juventus this summer, that was never going to be guaranteed with Matthijs de Ligt and Leonardo Bonucci entrenched as the likely starters in the center of defense.

Who knows what was truly behind Atalanta’s sudden change of heart when it comes to Demiral’s future in Bergamo. Maybe it was financial, maybe it was a fit, maybe they have plans like they did with Cristian Romero and will be the ones who flip him to the Premier League rather than watching Juventus do that. (That just seems too possible, doesn’t it?)

But what now definitely feels real is the fact that Juventus won’t be seeing Demiral coming back to Turin this summer with an unknown future ahead of him. That last part could still be the case, but it won’t be Juve potentially cashing in on him if there is any kind of big-money sale to an English club.