Loan with obligation for next year. When Ronaldo leaves we'll have Aouar, Kulu, Arthur, Benta, Demiral and De Ligt to build around. Sounds like a great young core of players to build around.
Flashbacks to the 2015/2016 season when i felt the exact same about the core involving Dybala-Pogba-AlexSandro-Morata + back-ups Pereyra/Lemina/Zaza/Rugani and even Sturaro that was/were considered promising at the time.
Now fast forward to not longer than three seasons after it and the only ones we had left were Dybala, Alex Sandro and Rugani from that bunch.
Players come and go, opportunities arise, players will etc, hopefully this time it will work out better for us as it obviously feels that there is better quality in the ones we have now compared to some of the flops we tried to build around before. So yeah, i really do hope you are right man.