AS Roma has lobbed an opening offer at Chelsea for Argentine winger Alejandro Garnacho, proposing a €5 million loan fee paired with a €35 million option to buy. Chelsea, meanwhile, wants roughly €50 million in a straight sale. The gap between those two positions is the kind of chasm that either produces weeks of tedious negotiation or kills a deal entirely.
The deal structure, decoded
Roma’s proposal follows what insiders are calling a “Malen-style” arrangement, referencing a previous transfer for Dutch forward Donyell Malen that used a similar framework. The structure works like this: Roma would pay €5 million upfront just to borrow Garnacho for a season. The €35 million buy option could become mandatory if certain conditions are met, likely tied to a set number of appearances or specific performance benchmarks.
The total potential value of Roma’s offer, €40 million when you combine the loan fee and the buy option, still sits €10 million below Chelsea’s valuation. What makes this particularly interesting from a financial structuring perspective is the conditional trigger mechanism. If the buy option becomes obligatory after, say, 25 league appearances, it functions almost identically to a call option in traditional finance. Roma gets downside protection (if Garnacho flops, they walk away having paid only €5 million), while Chelsea faces the risk of losing a player at below-market value if he performs well.
