Openda’s loan becomes a €40m permanent deal Juventus could not avoid

Some transfers are chased for months. This one Juventus barely had a say in. Loïs Openda is now a permanent Bianconeri player, his season-long loan from RB Leipzig converted into a deal worth around €40.6m, and the striker has signed a contract in Turin that runs until June 2030. The catch is that Juventus did not so much decide to buy him as find themselves obliged to.

When Openda arrived on the final day of the 2025 window, the loan came with a €3.3m fee and an obligation to buy that switched on the moment Juventus finished inside Serie A’s top ten. They did, comfortably, and the clause did the rest. By the time the paperwork went through on July 1, the move had long felt inevitable.

A clause that made the choice for them

Clauses like this are meant to protect the selling club, and for RB Leipzig it worked perfectly. They banked a fee north of €40m for a player who spent the year struggling in Italy, while Juventus were left holding a contract they might not have signed off on in a straight negotiation this summer.

It is the sort of small-print detail that looks harmless when a deal is struck and awkward twelve months later. Juventus agreed to the terms in good faith, backing Openda to rediscover the form that once made him one of the most coveted forwards in Europe. Instead the trigger arrived alongside a season that gave them every reason to hesitate.

A debut season that fell flat

The numbers make uncomfortable reading. Openda managed a single goal in his Serie A appearances this season and just two across all competitions, a return that would embarrass a squad player, let alone a €40m striker.

This is a player who tore up Ligue 1 at Lens and scored freely in the Bundesliga for Leipzig, so the drop-off was jarring rather than gradual. He never nailed down a starting role, drifted in and out of the side, and cut an increasingly peripheral figure as the season wore on. For a forward who moved to Turin to prove himself at a bigger club, it could hardly have gone worse.

Now Juventus have to make it work

The timing sharpens the problem. Dušan Vlahović, comfortably Juventus’ most reliable striker last season, is leaving on a free, which strips the squad of the one forward who consistently found the net. That leaves Openda on the books as a €40m asset the club now has little choice but to rehabilitate, whether or not he was ever first in line.

There is talk that a return to Lens could tempt him if the right offer appears, and Juventus would not stand in the way of recouping some value. For now, though, he stays, and the job is to coax the striker Leipzig and Lens saw out of a player Turin has barely glimpsed. A fresh season and a clean slate might help. On the evidence of the last one, it will take more than that.

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