Juventus entered pre-season training with an additional keeper on the roster. This issue has now been addressed.

There had been numerous reports that Mattia Perin would be loaned out to Genoa again, and on Friday it was formalized. Interestingly, it’s a dry loan, even though Perin still has an extra year on his contract with Juventus that would have made the call option a possibility.

Perin has been in limbo since joining Juve from the Grifone in the summer of 2018 for an amount of 14.2 million euros in transfer fees. He had been one of Italy’s greatest goalkeeper talents for years, although he had to recover from a pair of ACL tears. But this decision did not bring his career to the level he was hoping for. Gianluigi Buffon had just left for his one-year stay in France, but the Bianconeri Wojciech Szczesny already had, who had shown himself worthy of the starting place when Buffon was absent for several months with a leg injury. Perin ostensibly arrived to compete with him for the starting goalie position, but if there was any competition for the place, it was symbolic. Szczesny was clearly No.1 from the start, and Perin has only played nine games this year. He hasn’t even played in Coppa Italia, despite the club’s traditional practice of starting the No.2 goalkeeper in Coppa matches.

Perin ended this campaign on the set with a shoulder injury which also caused him to miss much of the first part of last season. By then, Buffon had returned to serve as Szczesny’s replacement, leaving Perin with little in the way of the squad. He was loaned to Genoa during the January transfer window and has played his last 21 games of the year with his No.1 shirt on his back. Now he’s going back to the Marassi again.

It has always been a bit confusing for me that Perin chose to move to Juventus in the first place. Perhaps Szczesny wasn’t entrenched in the starting position when he arrived, but he certainly had a head start, as other Serie A teams – particularly Roma, who had just sold Alisson to Liverpool – could have guaranteed him the starting gloves and, had he remained healthy, he could have kept him in the conversation when it comes to the national team. Now he’s reeling with loans to coffee table clubs, and the future of his career is far from certain.

He’s still relatively young for a goalie at 27, so he has time to right the ship, and he hopes another stint at his childhood club will get him there.