Gianluigi Buffon has sealed a dramatic return to Parma 20 years after he left the club to join Italian giants, Juventus.
Buffon made 220 appearances and won three trophies for Parma between 1995 until 2001, when he left for Turin in a £32million move – at the time a record fee for a goalkeeper – to replace Edwin van der Sar.
The 43-year-old goalkeeper left Juve at the end of the last campaign, where he had been for two decades, either side of a 12-month spell at Paris Saint-Germain in 2018-19.
Parma tweeted the announcement with a video of a man in a black hooded jumper, walking onto the club’s home pitch to dig up an old treasure chest with a Superman t-shirt and Parma jersey, before Buffon revealed himself and said: “I’m back.”
The goalkeeper won 10 Serie A titles and five Coppa Italias in 684 appearances Turin, but his first pieces of silverware came in the 1998-99 season when Parma won the UEFA Cup as well as the Coppa Italia and Supercoppa Italiana.
Buffon also spent a year at Paris Saint-Germain – where he won Ligue 1 – in 2018-19, but returned to Juventus the following season after making just 25 appearances for the French side.
