OFFICIALLY OFFICIAL: Adrien Rabiot signs new deal with Juventus through 2024

There’s been a whole lot of the talk, a whole lot the speculation, a whole lot the conjecture about Adrien Rabiot’s future at Juventus that’s been happening over the last couple of months. The general feeling that when Juve’s season ended at the beginning of the month, so would Rabiot’s career in Juve colors, with a big contract — likely from a deep-pocketed Premier League club — on the way after the best year of his career.

As it turns out, that proved to be a whole bunch of wasted air.

Juventus announced Tuesday that the 28-year-old Rabiot isn’t going anywhere other than back to Turin, as the Frenchman signed a one-year contract extension through 2024. As it has been reported quite frequently over the last handful of days, the big surprise besides Rabiot simply sticking around is that his one-year deal comes for the same €7 million net annual salary that he earned during the course of his first four seasons in Turin.

Juventus ultimately won out despite a last-minute approach by Manchester United to sign Rabiot, but even with a reported deal that was worth more and for more years there was no changing the Frenchman’s mind — he wanted to stay at Juve.

In a video posted to Juve’s social media channels, Rabiot said: “I’m thrilled to confirm to you that I’ll be a Juventus player next season. It’s a choice I’ve made with my heart. I’m so attached to the club colors and the jersey. I grew up here and I’ve improved on the pitch and also as a man here. I can’t wait to start the new season and as I promised a few months ago, my aim is to always give 100% for Juventus and for all the fans.”

Rabiot is coming off the best season of his professional career, scoring 11 goals in all competitions and appearing in the second-most amount of games behind Danilo. It was that kind of season in which Rabiot found the consistency and the promise in which we had essentially been waiting for ever since he arrived from Paris Saint-Germain, with his only other extended period of quality play coming during the summer restart of 2020 after lockdown.

But it was a second season under Max Allegri that did the trick following a stretch of playing for three managers in his first three seasons with Juventus.

Rabiot staying around certainly wasn’t expected a week or so ago, let alone a couple of weeks back when the 2022-23 season came to a close. The talk about Rabiot was more about who Juve might sign to replace him rather than how he fits into next season’s squad. But now he’s back in the fold, and the number of Frenchmen in Juventus’ midfield remains at two. One of those proved to be much more durable than the other last season. Now we wait and see if they will actually be able to play alongside one another in the same midfield a couple of months from now.