Of all the protracted negotiations between Aston Villa and Juventus over the summer, it was a deal for a player who would never appear in the men’s first team of either club that was perhaps the most intriguing.
Douglas Luiz swapping the Premier League for Serie A for £42million (€50m; $55m) was surprising given his importance to Unai Emery’s team, but made financial sense considering Villa’s need to be compliant with profit and sustainability rules (PSR).
Those requirements helped to explain the transfers of Samuel Iling-Junior and Enzo Barrenechea, who joined Villa in transfers that enabled the Italian side to recoup £18.3m (both players are spending the season elsewhere, with Iling-Junior at Bologna and Barrenechea at Valencia).
But it was the deal that took Villa Women’s Switzerland international Alisha Lehmann from Villa Park to Turin that was the most unusual, because it completed a rare ‘couples transfer’ — in which a male and female player move from the same selling club to the same buying team. In this case, Lehmann followed her partner Douglas Luiz just seven days after his move was completed.
This is how the deals happened and how they are working out.
On June 30, Douglas Luiz swapped Villa for Juventus — it was the final day for Villa to add…
