Part of me wonders if this is something akin to a Marcus Pettersson deal (he was signed to a 1-year low-level deal to help the team out of a salary crunch, being 'made whole' by renewing at an inflated amount for the following 5 years, and when the two contracts were added together, they made a perfectly reasonable price for a six year deal for him) based on balancing the budget in a post-Corona world. MAL is coming off an injury, and Valverde's current contract is up at the end of 2021. There may be a carrot being dangled at the end of the year, as with Valverde's salary likely coming off the rider payroll or being re-upped at a lower level, there will be more money available to extend MAL if he lives up to expectations, but as he's coming off injury the extension offer will be performance-based? Effectively "we want you for X number of years, we offer you this for year 1, but what we offer you beyond that will be based on how things go" - and MAL may be happy enough to accept that that because he won't necessarily be an unquestioned leader in the team, so he wants the out clause to be able to go somewhere else immediately if the team and him are not a fit - or it may be that because teams' budgets are being hit, the kind of salary offer he's seeing in the marketplace is not what he'd ideally be looking for, so Movistar offering him a short term deal that means he has maximum freedom to renegotiate when times are less hard up?