It started, as many good calcio arguments do, with numbers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Fefu kicked it off this time, laying out the comparison simply. Gonzalo Higua\u00edn and Dusan Vlahovic, side by side, at Juventus. Same goals. Same Serie A goals. Nearly identical minutes. The assists gap barely registers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cLogic and numbers say that Vlahovic should be seen as favourably by fans as Higua\u00edn,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWhy not?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
It\u2019s a genuinely good question. Not because the answer is obvious, but because it isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
And it turns out to be a timely one. Vlahovic\u2019s contract expires at the end of June, and reports this week confirmed what had been building for a while \u2014 talks have broken down, and he\u2019ll be leaving Turin as a free agent. The debate about whether Juventus should keep him is over. What remains is the more practical question: What exactly are they losing, and what does whoever comes next actually need to replace?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
So the question isn\u2019t just whether Vlahovic compares favorably to a beloved predecessor. It\u2019s what his departure actually means \u2014 and what Juventus need to find to replace it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Most people\u2019s instinct \u2014 including Fefu\u2019s own, by his admission \u2014 is that Higua\u00edn was the better striker. The headline numbers don\u2019t give that instinct much to stand on. So where does it come from? And is it actually justified?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Understanding that gap matters now more than ever. Because before Juventus can know what they need, they have to know what they actually had.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Let\u2019s start with the shot maps, because location tells you something about intent.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
At Juventus, both players operated centrally, within the penalty area, with shot concentrations around the spot and the zone just in front of it. Neither was a striker who drifted wide to create. Neither was padding his numbers from distance. On the surface, two penalty-box forwards doing penalty-box forward things.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Higua\u00edn\u2019s most common shooting position wasn\u2019t directly on the penalty spot. It was slightly to the left of it. That might sound like a minor detail. It isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Higua\u00edn wasn\u2019t a player who carried the ball. He wasn\u2019t beating defenders off the dribble or manufacturing his own shots with his feet. His movement was almost entirely about finding space to receive the ball \u2014 and then taking a touch or two before committing. What the shot map suggests is that this movement was deliberate and precise. Positioning himself slightly left of center allowed him to find gaps between defenders, space that closing down the central zone directly in front of goal would have denied him. And once he received there, he could move onto his stronger right foot and attack the goal in a single, flowing motion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s the kind of positioning that looks simple and is anything but.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Vlahovic, by contrast, keeps his shots very central. There\u2019s a logic to that \u2014 the penalty spot is where the geometry of goal is most favorable, and elite strikers are supposed to live there. But in practice, that\u2019s also where defenders concentrate. Staying pinned to the central zone means contesting the most crowded real estate in the penalty area. Whether Vlahovic\u2019s centrality is a tactical instruction, a habit, or something else entirely is hard to say from shot data alone. What we can say is that it produces a different kind of shooting profile \u2014 one with more natural angles on his stronger foot, but with potentially more traffic and less space.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The heat maps reinforce the distinction. Higua\u00edn\u2019s density is tighter and more deliberately positioned. Vlahovic\u2019s spreads wider, with more activity at the edge of the area and beyond. He takes on harder shots more frequently. Some of that is almost certainly a product of the teams around him \u2014 a point we\u2019ll return to \u2014 but the pattern is consistent enough to be worth noting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Two penalty-box forwards. Meaningfully different approaches to occupying the box.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Before we get to where the comparison fractures, it\u2019s worth sitting with where it holds.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n On decisive goals \u2014 those that gave Juventus a win or salvaged a draw \u2014 Vlahovic actually has a slight edge. He scored decisive goals in nearly 23% of his Serie A appearances at Juventus. Higua\u00edn in 19%. Similarly, 46% of Vlahovic\u2019s goals were decisive to 44% of Higua\u00edn\u2019s. Not a dramatic gap, but a real one. The idea that Vlahovic disappears in important moments doesn\u2019t have a lot of support here.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n On multi-goal games, Higua\u00edn scores in those games at a modestly higher rate (44% vs 40%). Higua\u00edn was also more likely to score in any given game he played \u2014 39% of appearances resulted in a goal, compared to 37% for Vlahovic. Again, fine differences, but real ones.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Goals per game at Juventus: both 0.5.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The surface stays flat. Which makes what\u2019s underneath it more interesting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Opponent quality is where the comparison begins to pull apart.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n To understand how each player distributed their goals across competition levels, we can look at the share of goals scored against a given tier relative to the share of games played against that tier. A ratio of 1.0 means perfectly proportional. Above means they outscored their exposure. Below means they came up short of it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Against sides that finished in the top four\u2014the Champions League places\u2014Higua\u00edn scored at 0.43 goals per game across 14 matches, a ratio of 0.89. Nearly proportional output against the toughest opponents on the calendar. Vlahovic against the same tier: 0.20 goals per game across 10 games, a ratio of 0.41.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The pattern holds against Europa League sides: Higua\u00edn at 0.46 per game, ratio 0.94. Vlahovic at 0.33, ratio 0.68.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Flip to the bottom of the table and the picture inverts sharply. Vlahovic scores at 0.65 per game against bottom-half mid-table sides \u2014 his 28 goals across 43 games against that tier is the single largest contributor to his overall Juventus tally, and his ratio of 1.33 reflects how heavily his production concentrates there. Higua\u00edn against the same sides: 0.41 per game, ratio 0.85.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The top-half mid-table tier is where the contrast is sharpest in the other direction. Higua\u00edn scored at 0.70 per game against those sides, a ratio of 1.45 \u2014 his most productive tier by either measure. Vlahovic at 0.32 per game, ratio 0.65.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s worth noting that weaker sides in Serie A don\u2019t necessarily mean more open games. Smaller clubs tend to defend compact against Juventus. They\u2019re not set up to attack. They\u2019re set up to survive.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Of course, within those attempts to stay compact and defend deeper, individual mistakes happen more often. The athleticism drops off. The talent gap creates opportunities that stronger sides simply don\u2019t give you.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But those advantages shrink as the quality rises. Higua\u00edn\u2019s distribution tells that story by contrast \u2014 his ratios are remarkably flat across tiers, suggesting output that was robust to context rather than dependent on it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Vlahovic\u2019s curve is steeper. Higher peaks where the talent gap is widest, sharper drop-offs when it narrows. That\u2019s not a character judgment. It\u2019s a structural observation about where his production comes from \u2014 and for a club that needs to compete in the top four and in Europe, it matters which kind of striker you have.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This is where we need to slow down, because the most important part of this analysis only works if we\u2019re starting from the same place.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Expected goals (xG) is a way of quantifying shot quality. Every shot gets assigned a probability of resulting in a goal based on factors like distance, angle, whether it was a header or a foot shot, and the nature of the chance that created it. Taking it a step further, I actually worked on improving one of the more easily accessible, public xG model. I call the new metric SxG (Semperty\u2019s xG \u2014 the name\u2019s a work in progress). That\u2019s what we\u2019ll be dealing with moving forward.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Here\u2019s what\u2019s worth understanding before we go further: SxG is not precise. A shot assigned 0.7 SxG doesn\u2019t mean it should go in exactly 70% of the time \u2014 it means that shots taken from broadly similar positions and circumstances go in roughly 70% of the time. The factors that go into the model are real, but football is too chaotic and contextual for any model to capture perfectly. We talk about SxG in decimal points because that\u2019s how the math works, not because that\u2019s how accurately it describes reality.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n What it does capture is something we already understood before we had the data to quantify it. We\u2019ve talked about big chances and long shots forever. \u201cLong shot\u201d became a colloquial expression for low probability long before anyone had the computational power to calculate one. SxG is a formalization of intuitions about shot quality that football people have always had. The model isn\u2019t perfect, but it\u2019s measuring something real.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n With that established: Higua\u00edn scored 47 non-penalty goals at Juventus against an SxG of 34.7. He outperformed his expected goals by 12.3 over three seasons.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Vlahovic has scored 41 non-penalty goals against an SxG of 42.5. He has underperformed his expected goals by 1.53 goals over four-and-a-half seasons.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Pause on this for a moment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The gap between them is real \u2014 Higua\u00edn outperformed his SxG by 12.3 over three seasons, while Vlahovic has underperformed by 1.53 across four-and-a-half seasons. But the scale of that difference is worth sitting with. Vlahovic\u2019s cumulative underperformance across his entire Juventus career is smaller than what Higua\u00edn exceeded in a single good stretch. On a per-season basis, Vlahovic is essentially tracking his expected output.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"Higua\u00edn\u2019s](\"https:\/\/platform.blackwhitereadallover.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/33\/2026\/06\/combined_shot_map_all_shots_7aa704.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100\")
<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nSimilar in the ways that count \u2014 at first<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nWhere it starts to fracture<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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