Thursday, March 05, 2015

Palmer-Brown Transfer Almost Done

Buried in the announcement of the new collective bargaining agreement and the announcement of Kansas City's new primary jersey was some news that could turn out to be quite big regarding Sporting KC and their youngest player, Erik Palmer-Brown. During yesterday's media day before the unveiling of the jersey, Robb Heineman said that the long rumored move by Palmer-Brown to Italian giants, Juventus looks like it's going to happen.

Heineman said that there was an 80 percent chance that Palmer-Brown ends up making the move to Turin. It seems that the deal is basically done and it's just a matter of finalizing everything. A deal would be the finalization of over a year's worth of rumors about the Italian club being interested in the US youth international. Most of the rumors have come out of Italy, from what writer, so much so that I'd gotten to the point of ignoring most of his posts on it, waiting for other media to report it with actual quotes from someone on either side of the situation. I'd never doubted that a deal could be done, I just grew tired of the consistent non-news of the guy's reports on the deal, which were basically the same thing over and over.

With the deal though, Heineman said that Juventus would likely loan Palmer-Brown back to Kansas City for a period of time after the permanent transfer was completed. Similar to the situation with DeAndre Yedlin, Tottenham, and the Seattle Sounders, where Yedlin finished out the 2014 season with the Sounders before moving to join Spurs in England. I think that'd be a good move for both Palmer-Brown and the club to get him to stay on. An arrival in Italy would just see him immediately loaned out to a club in the lower divisions of Italy so might as well keep him in a comfortable situation for a while longer.

My assumption is that the move would occur this summer once Palmer-Brown is 18 and the Italian summer window opens.

For me, I'm still a little torn on this move, I think it's a great potential move for Palmer-Brown, a chance to go abroad and be signed by one of the big clubs in Italy. It's also a great feather in the cap of the Sporting academy which will be able to say that they trained a player who went on to be signed by Juventus to a contract. On the other hand I don't want a player with Palmer-Brown's potential to get lost in Juventus' system (just take a look at all their loans out) and have his development stall out while being loaned from team to team. That said good for him on the potential move and fulfilling a dream of playing abroad.

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