On paper, the deal writes itself. A 50% sell-on clause that effectively halves the cost of one of the World Cup’s most impressive young centre-backs. A chief executive in Giovanni Carnevali who knows the player intimately from his time at Sassuolo. A manager in Luciano Spalletti who is convinced he can manage and elevate Muharemović’s qualities. And a close personal friendship with Kenan Yıldız that, on the surface, makes a return to Turin feel almost inevitable.
And yet, beneath the financial elegance of the operation, lies a more delicate and human question — one rooted not in transfer mechanics but in pride.
The Wound That Has Not Fully Healed
Muharemović’s relationship with Juventus is not a simple story of a young player who left to find playing time elsewhere. It is, by his own account, a considerably more painful one. Speaking to DAZN, the defender has previously described the experience of watching teammates make their first-team debuts at Juventus while he alone remained on the outside looking in: “I don’t like talking about it, because I went through some difficult moments. It wasn’t easy to watch my teammates make their debut while I was the only one who didn’t play. I don’t like talking about it because I felt very bad.”
That is not the language of a player with uncomplicated nostalgia for his former club. It is the language of someone who felt overlooked, sidelined, and ultimately forced to seek opportunity elsewhere. When he eventually informed Juventus, upon returning from a pre-season training camp in Germany, that he wanted a different path — whether in Serie A or Serie B — it was a decision born of genuine frustration, not simple ambition.
Why Sassuolo Felt Like Home
What followed was, by Muharemović’s own telling, close to a footballing rebirth. Sassuolo’s interest arrived at the right moment, and the project appealed to him immediately. “It’s a choice I would make again today — I am very happy here,” he has said. “I told my agent: if there are young players who want to grow and play, Sassuolo is the perfect club.” That is a remarkably contented assessment from a player who has since become one of Serie A’s most coveted defensive prospects — and it underlines just how far his relationship with his parent club, Juventus, had to travel before reaching that point of healing.
The Compensating Factors
None of this means a return is impossible — far from it. Muharemović retains a deep personal connection to his time in the Juventus youth system, describing his development there in unambiguously positive terms: training alongside Leonardo Bonucci and Giorgio Chiellini, he says, was “a school for defenders” whose lessons have stayed with him permanently. “When we see each other today, we greet each other and talk — it’s a really nice thing,” he has said of his former mentors.
His friendship with Yıldız, forged during their shared time in the Juventus Primavera, remains genuinely close — a relationship Juventus’s recruitment team regard as a meaningful, if secondary, factor in any potential transfer discussion. And the presence of Carnevali, a figure Muharemović trusts and respects from his time at Sassuolo, offers a fundamentally different dynamic to the one he experienced as a teenager struggling for recognition under previous regimes.
A Question Only Muharemović Can Answer
The financial architecture of this deal is about as favourable as Juventus could hope for: a player valued at around €30 million by Sassuolo, available to his old club for roughly half that figure thanks to the sell-on clause retained at the time of his departure. Spalletti is convinced he can get the very best from him. The relationships are largely in place.
What remains uncertain is something no spreadsheet can calculate: whether Muharemović is ready to walk back through the doors of a club where he once felt invisible — and whether doing so, even as a returning hero rather than an overlooked academy prospect, sits comfortably with him. For Carnevali, navigating that emotional terrain with the same care he has shown in structuring the financial side of the deal may prove just as important as the numbers themselves.
