Emi Martinez to Juventus Transfer Link Situation
After a couple weeks of links, reports of a personal agreement between Emiliano Martínez and Juventus emerged earlier this week, with Italian sources indicating the goalkeeper had provisionally accepted a three-year contract on reduced wages — from his current reported €7 million per season to around €5.5 million net. It looked like there was genuine momentum for a transfer.
The fee has been considered in the press as the obstacle, and with it comes the fuller picture of what Juventus were actually doing. Aston Villa’s supposed valuation of Martínez sits at £10-15 million. The Serie A club’s willingness to pay sits considerably lower. The gap between those two positions has not moved, and the reason it has not moved is it seems Juventus are not short of alternatives.
Juventus Keeper Alternatives
Guglielmo Vicario, currently at Tottenham, has emerged as another option for Juventus head coach Luciano Spalletti. The 29-year-old Italy international has two years remaining on his contract and has been available for the right price since Spurs paid £17.2 million to sign him from Empoli in 2023. Juventus, however, are reportedly reluctant to exceed £13 million for Vicario — which tells you everything about how seriously they want to pay Villa’s asking price for Martínez. A 33-year-old goalkeeper on €5.5 million a season is already a significant wage commitment; adding a double-figure transfer fee on top of that, for a player entering the perceived final years of his peak, is a harder sell.
If neither deal is completed, Spalletti has a further fallback in Alex Meret at Napoli. He worked under the head coach during the season Napoli won the Serie A title, and the familiarity would certainly help. There is also a chain effect worth noting: a Meret departure would open a vacancy at Napoli that creates room for them to pursue Vicario, a move which Napoli are also understood to want.
Agent Window Shopping
The picture, then, is of a club window shopping through agents, testing multiple options simultaneously, seeing which one moves first at the lowest cost. Juventus identified Villa’s UEFA financial settlement, which essentially requires the club to break even on player transactions and has created well-documented pressure to generate outgoing funds, as a potential lever. The assumption, presumably, was that financial constraint might push Villa into accepting less than Martínez is worth.
That assumption deserves to be rejected firmly. Villa are on the eve of a Champions League campaign. Martínez is not an ageing squad player whose wages need to be cleared off the books; he is a world-class goalkeeper at the peak of his powers. He fractured the ring finger on his right hand warming up for the Europa League final against Freiburg, still played in the final, then resisted surgery, and played through the World Cup group stages for Argentina with a splint. He is expected to face Cape Verde without it, which, if it holds, suggests the worst of the injury is behind him. That is not the profile of a player a club in the Champions League should be moving on from.
The UEFA settlement is a constraint on transfer spending, not a fire sale notice. Selling a cornerstone of the team cheap, to a club that already has two other options lined up, would be exactly the kind of reckless transfer decision that created the UEFA settlement situation in the first place.
The club has made no public comment on any approach, and most of the noise on the matter at the moment, thankfully, seems to be from transfer influencer shills.
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