Reports: Juventus will not activate Leandro Paredes’ buy option

Knowing that Juventus was headed toward another fiscal year with a whole lot of millions in losses being reported, Leandro Paredes would have to do a whole lot on the field to make picking up his buy option as well as continuing to pay his very high salary worth it.

As we’ve seen for much of the 2022-23 season, Paredes has not done that.

So, as you can probably imagine, the likelihood of that option being picked is becoming slimmer and slimmer.

According to reports from Italian journalists Nicolo Schira and Matteo Moretto, it is a near formality that Juventus won’t pick up the option to buy Paredes outright, which will see the World Cup winner head back to Paris Saint-Germain this summer when his season-long loan stint comes to an end. What happens after that is also quite up in the air, according to Moretto, but from Juventus’ point of view things seem rather clear: the 28-year-old Paredes has not done enough to convince the Bianconeri front office that he should stay past this season despite the fact that he was a player in which manager Max Allegri wanted during the summer transfer window.

This is no surprise. Not even one bit considering how Paredes has played this season. With the buy option that Paredes had worked into his loan deal, the World Cup winner would have really had to do a lot to convince Juventus to spend nearly €23 million to sign him outright. But when you consider how he has seen playing time be completely inconsistent and has failed to deliver in the role that he was brought in to do,

Paredes looks to be part of a group that will be leaving during the summer, with Adrien Rabiot still having not agreed to a contract extension as well as Juan Cuadrado and Alex Sandro also on expiring contracts. Throw in the fact that we don’t really know what will happen with another on-loan midfielder, Weston McKennie, if Leeds United gets relegated and you’ve got a whole lot of players who are potentially (probably?) leaving in a few months.

But for Paredes, the biggest thing about his Juventus tenure is how he’s just been a complete dud he’s been when it comes to trying to make a positive impact when he plays.

In his 15 league appearances spanning just 576 minutes, Paredes has yet to record an assist. In fact, his lone assist on the season came when he was still with Paris Saint-Germain, which just shows you how things have gone since he came to Juventus.

Essentially, Paredes’ most memorable moment of the season since arriving in Turin — outside of when he’s played like crap for Juventus — was when he launched a ball completely out of the blue toward the Netherlands’ bench at the World Cup. That’s not exactly a good look for a guy who is very much looking like a guy who at a career crossroads.