By the time Kylian Mbappe had turned 22, he had racked up 22 goals in the most glamorous of club competitions. Erling Haaland will only turn 22 in July. He already has 23 Champions League goals to his name.
In the age of the precocious super-striker, there is some catching up to do for the third member of a cohort of forwards earmarked to set records at the elite level of their sport for the next decade - or, as it’s sometimes put, in what will be football’s post-Messi-and-Ronaldo era.
This evening Dusan Vlahovic belatedly takes to the Champions League stage, making his debut in the competition. He’ll be wearing Ronaldo’s old Juventus jersey and carrying into the compact surroundings of Villarreal’s Ceramica stadium the biggest price-tag from the last transfer window.
Juventus committed €70m, with further €10m in add-ons, to sign Vlahovic from Fiorentina just as he approached his 22nd birthday last month. They came out ahead in a jostle of suitors, among the most determined being Arsenal, and the size of the fee, along with the decision of the player to opt for Juve, signalled a vote of confidence in a club whose fortunes have waned in the past 18 months.
This season, like last, is developing in a battle to finish in Serie A’s top four, a modest target for the winners of nine of the last 10 scudetti, Italian titles. Nor have Juventus’s dealings in the transfer market over recent summers - or winters - greatly polished the club’s high reputation as shrewd recruiters of good-value assets.
Having dedicated a vast chunk of their budget to signing Cristiano Ronaldo in 2018 with the declaration he would be the missing piece of a jigsaw that featured a long-awaited Champions League triumph, they let Ronaldo go, at a loss, last summer.
He had scored, as ever, heavily - but there was no European Cup from his Juve stint to add to the five he has accumulated between spells at Real Madrid, and, back in 2008, Manchester United.
Vlahovic’s Serie A credentials speak for themselves. Fiorentina had him lined up to sign, from Partizan Belgrade as soon as he turned 18. In 108 games for them he struck 44 goals, establishing himself as a high-pedigree penalty-box operator, but with an ever sharper set of tools from deeper and wider positions.
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He arrived in Italy dubbed ‘The Zlatan of Belgrade’, a nickname Vlahovic had partly prompted by his own confession that Zlatan Ibrahimovic was his idol and role model growing up.
When Juventus head coach, Max Allegri welcomed him to Turin last month, he moved the dial to the next generation: “He’s up there with the best, alongside Mbappe and Haaland.”
The hype was justified almost immediately. Within 13 minutes of his Juventus debut, Vlahovic had scored his first goal, demonstrating an unflustered cool in his measured lob, on the run, over the advancing Hellas Verona goalkeeper Lorenzo Montipo.
Four evenings later, there was another show reel of Vlahovic’s excellence playing off the shoulder of the last defender. He picked up a long pass, worked his way goalwards from wide on the Juventus left to engineer the winning goal in a Coppa Italian quarter-final against Sassuolo.
The duel for a place in the last eight of the Champions League against Europa League-holders Villarreal, represents a significant step up, said Allegri, tempering his effusive bracketing of his new striker with those European Cup-weathered contemporaries, Haaland and Mbappe.
“We must not weigh Dusan down with responsibilities,” advised the Juve head coach, anticipating an “even, 50-50” last-16 tie. “He has great qualities, but this [the Champions League] is a new experience, and we need to support him.”
Unavailable, because of injury, to back up Vlahovic, will be Pablo Dybala, with whom a promising understanding is already developing. Juventus are likely to be spearheaded by a more like-for-like attacking pair, in Vlahovic and Alvaro Morata.
Morata, whose place in the Juve hierarchy had seemed most compromised by the Vlahovic signing, said yesterday the Serbian forward’s arrival had galvanised Juventus’s season.
“He’s been nothing but positive, on and off the pitch,” said Morata. “He’s a great footballer, he’s young and he has a terrific career ahead of him. He’s adapted very well. We’re all hoping to see him score his first Champions League goals.”
