Talking Dusan Vlahovic with somebody who used to root for him all the time

Hey, all. Danny here. Over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking of ways to talk about one of the bigger storylines of the summer a little differently than we have in the past. I didn’t just want to write yet another post from in my own words about how Dusan Vlahovic hasn’t done well at Juventus and how he’s going to (probably) leave Juventus this summer.

Instead, I wanted to go against the grain a bit.

Then I remembered something that Chuks and Kaush did years ago when talking about Juventus as a whole. And the lightbulb went off. How could I have a conversation about Vlahovic with somebody for this website and do so in a creative kind of way?

There’s nobody better than somebody who used to root for him right up until the day he signed for Juventus in January of 2022. That person is our dear friend of the blog, Tito, the man behind Viola Nation who has always been kind with his time when helping us out.

So enough of my rambling — let’s get right to it. Here’s my chat with Tito.

DP: Tito, Tito, Tito. We’re going to change things up a bit for this collaborative effort. We’re going to make it a little more informal rather than me just launching questions at you like Real Madrid toward Michele Di Gregorio at the Club World Cup and expecting answers straight away. We might as well both just pull up a chair, maybe grab a beverage or two and talk about our favorite Serbian striker.

That’s right, my friend. I’ve invited you here to talk about Dusan Vlahovic and what the heck has happened with him ever since he left your favorite club to sign with my favorite club and now looks to very much be on the outs in Turin.

TK: Wish you’d told me a little sooner this was informal. I feel slightly ridiculous wearing this purple crushed velvet tuxedo while you’re rocking shorts and an Ale Del Piero shirt with matching face paint, but it’s all good because we’re both dressed appropriately for these Cynar spritzes I made. Pro tip: Make more spritzes this summer and use amari that aren’t Aperol. You can get some nice summery flavors that are just a little different and give you that extra sheen of sophistication and sprezzatura.

And hey, speaking of effortlessness (how’s that for a conversational transition?), it’s everything that Vlahović isn’t. Dude seems like he’s been trying very hard for the past four years or so and now it’s catching up to him. Where do you want to start this little chat? Because I have a feeling I know where it’s going to end up: both of us shaking our heads at the sheer wastefulness of it all.

DP: Well, don’t worry. You’ll never go wrong when it comes to honoring Del Piero in any way or form around these parts. You probably know we’re rather fond of the guy and miss seeing him play dearly. Maybe we should plan a trip to his restaurant in L.A. as tribute? Ah well, that can wait for. Dinner reservations are probably not able to be book so far in advnace.

Back to Vlahovic since that is the main point here …

I guess we can start the chat with the very obvious question of this: You watched Vlahovic very closely when he truly broke out at Fiorentina. You’ve watched him at Juventus a handful of times since that big-money move 3 ¹⁄₂ years ago. What’s changed? Why hasn’t he been able to fulfill the potential that Juventus banked on when they signed him for all that money? We know the squad has been far from perfect during his time in bianconero, but just why do you think it hasn’t worked? And maybe even gotten worse as time has gone on?

TK: You nailed the simple answer: the squad has been far from perfect, particularly if it wants to get anything out of him. I’ll do the extremely humble thing where I quote an article I wrote last year.

“For all his tremendous ability, Vlahović generally relies on someone else to get him the ball in the right place. His physicality and technique allow his teammates a much larger margin for error but in the end, he needs someone else to set him up.”

While Vlahović has occasionally shown an ability to link play or get in behind and pace defenders — e.g. the equalizer against Inter Milan in 2019 — he’s never been all that good at the stuff strikers do in buildup. When he first broke through with the Viola, he obviously lacked the technical and tactical ability to link play. In hindsight, a big part of his breakthrough was cutting those efforts out of his game and focusing exclusively on working the box.

Because he’s big and athletic, people assume that he’s a classic prima punta who can hold up play as well as run in behind, but I’d argue that he’s stylistically closer to a diminutive poacher like Vincenzo Montella than Bobo Vieri, who was another big, strong, and quick striker but played as more of a number nine who was as comfortable playing with his back to goal as he was sprinting in behind.

In short, poachers gonna poach but ain’t gonna do much else, and Vlahović is a poacher. When you have that profile in a team that doesn’t create many chances, you’ve got a recipe for some Weston McKennie-level fusion cuisine, by which I mean it’s absolutely horrible. No disrespect to Wes, but that dude’s food takes are unhinged and he frightens me.

DP: I mean, I’m happy to turn this into a food chat if you want. You know how much we enjoy talking local Florence cuisine from time to time because I’ve watched Stanley Tucci walk around your favorite city in Italy.

(Insert one of his classic Instagram “Are we recording?” quips here. He’s the best!)

I guess I’ll ask my next question off what you just said. There’s been a decent amount of advanced stat folks going “I told you so!” in the last couple of weeks since the possibility of Juventus proposing a contract termination came out. Where do you think you fell in terms of all that when he first signed with Juve? Did you think he would continue his quick upward trajectory that saw him score as much as any striker in Europe during the 2021 calendar year? Or did you think said nerds had a point about him overperforming what the numbers told us and that the regression was gonna be something that resembled a pile of falling rocks?

TK: As someone with an English degree, I’m very well positioned to talk statistical analysis. I’m always skeptical of players outperforming their metrics, but when someone does it over multiple seasons, it means that it’s either a repeatable skill or the model’s broken. Since I trust Opta and Understat, Vlahović’s finishing must be a repeatable skill. Since becoming a full-time Serie A starter, he’s outperformed his xG in three of six years, per Opta, and that’s despite the first year being so bad in every way that I was mad that he was playing ahead of Patrick Cutrone, which sounds ridiculous now but was, I promise, a very defensible and somewhat popular opinion. 2019, man. What a year.

Something clicked, though, partway through 2020, largely due to San Cesare Prandelli, per Vlahović himself. I broke down his hot finishing several months later if you want more details, but the basic idea was that 21-year-old Dušan was operating at a level comparable to the best strikers in the league, and he maintained that level through the subsequent season and into the start of his Juventus tenure before falling off.

So yeah, what happened? Assuming he didn’t just forget how to play (unlikely) or suffer some sort of physical setback (unreported), I’d argue this is less about smugly proclaiming, “Regression to the mean,” and more about the complex interplay between player and system and situation and the sheer, all-encompassing mayhem that is the universe distilled into 22 players, a ref, and a ball in 7,140-ish square meters.

DP: Let’s go off of that last part next.

You know I watch Juventus pretty much every single time they are scheduled to play. You know that I’m even willing to fly to Las Vegas to see them play a friendly against a random Mexican side that will make it feel like I’m suddenly in Guadalajara because their fans have taken over 95% of the stadium. But for you as an outsider, what does that “all-encompassing mayhem” mean to you and how much do you think it played into Vlahovic not living up to expectations? How much of his lack of progression and living up to the massive transfer fee — if that was ever going to be possible — was situation?

Photo by Image Photo Agency/Getty Images

TK: Let’s start with the caveat that I am indeed an outsider here and your opinions on this subject are way more valid and you ought to shut me down if I’m way off, but from the outside, Juventus hasn’t been the most stable environment for the past few years. Different coaches with different philosophies that require different things from different players. That lack of continuity hasn’t helped anyone and it certainly hasn’t helped Vlahović.

I guess this is a larger soccer philosophy thing but changing systems hurts specialist players more than it hurts generalist players, and since I think Vlahović is a specialist player whose qualities–finishing, movement in the final third, physicality — he needs an attack built around him that emphasizes those strengths. To me, that’s a high line that ensures he’s always as close to the penalty box as possible; width to stretch opposing defenses and prevent them from collapsing on him or doubling up on him; and a couple of creators who can deform the opposing defense sufficiently for him to find little creases in it to exploit.

That’s the lower-level stuff that a competent manager can fix, but I’d argue it goes way beyond that. It’s about overarching vision across the entire first team, from the third-string goalkeeper to the star striker. At the risk of sounding like the most irritating businessman from 2001, it’s about synergy. Juve used to have it in spades; I mean, y’all turned Vincenzo Iaquinta into an Italy international, for crying out loud, because he was willing to work hard.

It’s not like y’all are Manchester United (a fun game to play with any Man U fans in your life: ask them who the last player to join the club and then individually improve was, then watch them experience every one of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief simultaneously) but everybody seems to be pulling in different directions. For as long as that happens, disappointments like Vlahović are just a symptom of a much larger issue.

DP: Oh, trust me. People have heard all of my Juventus opinions plenty around here. That’s why we need to freshen things up a bit — outsider or just another Juve-centric fan who knows who to scribble down their thoughts a little bit.

What you said after your very kind flattery toward the opinions regularly featured here also gets to the heart of what feels like a big piece to the puzzle. Yes, Vlahovic’s struggles are obvious. His development and forward progress as a striker have become especially stagnant over the last 12 months, and the fact that there is very little to no market around him right now only speaks volumes to that. But it’s impossible to think that somewhat of his struggles aren’t related to everything going on at Juventus situationally.

That has to be at least some of it. Or is that just the easy answer — or part of one — to an extremely complicated kind of tenure for a talented player who has not met expectations?

TK: As I said earlier, I’ve got a literature degree focused on modernism and post-modernism, so I’m all about everything having infinite and infinitely tangled root causes, and also sometimes in doing some Kafkaesque (love using that word) the-laws-of-causality-are-not-now-and-never-have-been-in-effect stuff. In this case, I think a big part of Vlahović’s stagnation/decline/wet fartness is the tactical context, but I also think there are plenty of other factors.

Specifically, I’m thinking about Vlahović’s attitude. When he broke through to Fiorentina’s first team, he was a teenager on a team centered around Franck Ribery, who was a shambling husk of his former self but still commanded (too much of) everyone’s respect. As you can imagine, Vlahović was pretty diffident at the beginning, clearly trying to fit in with the group. After a year or so, though, there was an enormous change in his on-field character.

Photo by Jonathan Moscrop/Getty Images

In short, he turned into a huge asshole. He was constantly barking at his teammates for poor passes or missing his runs or losing the ball in a way that really grated on me because he wasn’t producing at all. It was very clear to me that he was trying to act like a superstar and was hoping the results would follow the attitude, which is usually evidence of a desperate insecurity. If you’ve played at all, you’ve had that guy on your team, and if you haven’t, then you’re that guy. Regardless, nobody likes that guy, even if he’s actually good, which Vlahović assuredly wasn’t. Until he was.

DP: That is certainly hard to deny — at least from our point of view.

So, all in all, is it safe that your ole buddy Rocco B. Commisso is thinking about jumping into a giant pit of the €80 million or so that Juventus sent over to Fiorentina in the same kind of way that Scrooge McDuck does?

TK: Yes, but I think that noted friend of the site Rocco Commisso is swimming through his doubloons regardless. The guy’s very interested in the financial health of the club, but it’s also worth remembering that Vlahović was one of his vaunted “tre bandiere” (along with Federico Chiesa and Gaetano Castrovilli). Rocco was, like the other fans, pretty hurt by the way Vlahović forced his way out after the club had backed him to the hilt. Seeing the big Serbian flame out at Juve doubtless warms the cockles of Commisso’s vengeful heart, but not as much as a glance at the ledger between these teams.

DP: Well, now that we’ve brought Rocco into things, I feel like that’s a good place to put a lid on this chat before we get completely into the weeds. Tito, as always, we thank you for stopping by and having this new chat with us. You are always welcome around these parts.

You can follow Tito as the head honcho over at our SBN Italia brethren site Viola Nation as well as on the Viola Station podcast with the two Mikes, which you can subscribe to on your preferred listening platform.