It started, as many good calcio arguments do, with numbers.
Fefu kicked it off this time, laying out the comparison simply. Gonzalo Higuaín and Dusan Vlahovic, side by side, at Juventus. Same goals. Same Serie A goals. Nearly identical minutes. The assists gap barely registers.
“Logic and numbers say that Vlahovic should be seen as favourably by fans as Higuaín,” he wrote. “Why not?”
It’s a genuinely good question. Not because the answer is obvious, but because it isn’t.
And it turns out to be a timely
one. Vlahovic’s contract expires at the end of June, and reports this week confirmed what had been building for a while — talks have broken down, and he’ll 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?
So the question isn’t just whether Vlahovic compares favorably to a beloved predecessor. It’s what his departure actually means — and what Juventus need to find to replace it.
Most people’s instinct — including Fefu’s own, by his admission — is that Higuaín was the better striker. The headline numbers don’t give that instinct much to stand on. So where does it come from? And is it actually justified?
Understanding that gap matters now more than ever. Because before Juventus can know what they need, they have to know what they actually had.
How they shot, and where
Let’s start with the shot maps, because location tells you something about intent.
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.
But look closer.
Higuaín’s most common shooting position wasn’t directly on the penalty spot. It was slightly to the left of it. That might sound like a minor detail. It isn’t.
Higuaín wasn’t a player who carried the ball. He wasn’t 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 — 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.
It’s the kind of positioning that looks simple and is anything but.
Vlahovic, by contrast, keeps his shots very central. There’s a logic to that — the penalty spot is where the geometry of goal is most favorable, and elite strikers are supposed to live there. But in practice, that’s also where defenders concentrate. Staying pinned to the central zone means contesting the most crowded real estate in the penalty area. Whether Vlahovic’s 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 — one with more natural angles on his stronger foot, but with potentially more traffic and less space.
The heat maps reinforce the distinction. Higuaín’s density is tighter and more deliberately positioned. Vlahovic’s 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 — a point we’ll return to — but the pattern is consistent enough to be worth noting.
Two penalty-box forwards. Meaningfully different approaches to occupying the box.
Similar in the ways that count — at first
Before we get to where the comparison fractures, it’s worth sitting with where it holds.
On decisive goals — those that gave Juventus a win or salvaged a draw — Vlahovic actually has a slight edge. He scored decisive goals in nearly 23% of his Serie A appearances at Juventus. Higuaín in 19%. Similarly, 46% of Vlahovic’s goals were decisive to 44% of Higuaín’s. Not a dramatic gap, but a real one. The idea that Vlahovic disappears in important moments doesn’t have a lot of support here.
On multi-goal games, Higuaín scores in those games at a modestly higher rate (44% vs 40%). Higuaín was also more likely to score in any given game he played — 39% of appearances resulted in a goal, compared to 37% for Vlahovic. Again, fine differences, but real ones.
Goals per game at Juventus: both 0.5.
The surface stays flat. Which makes what’s underneath it more interesting.
Where it starts to fracture
Opponent quality is where the comparison begins to pull apart.
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.
Against sides that finished in the top four—the Champions League places—Higuaín 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.
The pattern holds against Europa League sides: Higuaín at 0.46 per game, ratio 0.94. Vlahovic at 0.33, ratio 0.68.
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 — 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. Higuaín against the same sides: 0.41 per game, ratio 0.85.
The top-half mid-table tier is where the contrast is sharpest in the other direction. Higuaín scored at 0.70 per game against those sides, a ratio of 1.45 — his most productive tier by either measure. Vlahovic at 0.32 per game, ratio 0.65.
It’s worth noting that weaker sides in Serie A don’t necessarily mean more open games. Smaller clubs tend to defend compact against Juventus. They’re not set up to attack. They’re set up to survive.
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’t give you.
But those advantages shrink as the quality rises. Higuaín’s distribution tells that story by contrast — his ratios are remarkably flat across tiers, suggesting output that was robust to context rather than dependent on it.
Vlahovic’s curve is steeper. Higher peaks where the talent gap is widest, sharper drop-offs when it narrows. That’s not a character judgment. It’s a structural observation about where his production comes from — and for a club that needs to compete in the top four and in Europe, it matters which kind of striker you have.
The xG problem
This is where we need to slow down, because the most important part of this analysis only works if we’re starting from the same place.
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’s xG — the name’s a work in progress). That’s what we’ll be dealing with moving forward.
Here’s what’s worth understanding before we go further: SxG is not precise. A shot assigned 0.7 SxG doesn’t mean it should go in exactly 70% of the time — 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’s how the math works, not because that’s how accurately it describes reality.
What it does capture is something we already understood before we had the data to quantify it. We’ve talked about big chances and long shots forever. “Long shot” 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’t perfect, but it’s measuring something real.
With that established: Higuaín scored 47 non-penalty goals at Juventus against an SxG of 34.7. He outperformed his expected goals by 12.3 over three seasons.
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.
Pause on this for a moment.
The gap between them is real — Higuaín 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’s cumulative underperformance across his entire Juventus career is smaller than what Higuaín exceeded in a single good stretch. On a per-season basis, Vlahovic is essentially tracking his expected output.
Which means the story isn’t quite what the raw goal totals suggest. Season by season, Vlahovic’s SxG deviation at Juventus has been remarkably contained — 1.43 over in 2021/22, 0.76 over in 2022/23, 0.60 over in 2023/24, 0.20 under in 2025/26. His Fiorentina record tells a similar story: seasons of 0.99 and 0.24 under expectations followed by 2.64 and 5.55 over. The variance moves in both directions, as it does for almost every striker over a large enough sample.
Look at the two distributions before looking at the outcomes. The shape is remarkably similar — both players took the bulk of their attempts in the low-SxG range, with comparable volume spreading into the higher-probability bands. This isn’t two strikers arriving at similar SxG totals through different routes. They were genuinely receiving the same kinds of chances, in roughly the same proportions.
The exception is 2024/25, and it stands apart from everything else in the dataset.
That season wasn’t just bad — it was bad in a specific and unusually complete way. In every other season of his career, Vlahovic scored 14 goals from 13.4 SxG on shots above 0.40 — converting almost exactly what the model expected. In 2024/25, he scored 2 from 3.8 SxG in that same range. And the one area where he had consistently exceeded expectations — converting low-probability chances — collapsed alongside it. He scored 17 goals from 10.6 SxG on sub-0.10 shots across all other seasons. 2 from 2.3 in 2024/25.
Every part of his finishing broke down at once.
What makes 2024/25 notable isn’t that Vlahovic underperformed — it’s that he underperformed in ways that were completely out of character with every other season of his career. Strip it out and you have a striker who converts high-quality chances at almost exactly the rate SxG predicts, exceeds expectations on difficult shots, and tracks his overall output closely across multiple seasons at two clubs.
That’s a different player than the cumulative numbers imply. And it’s probably the more accurate picture of who he actually is.
What we can actually say — and what Juventus vave to decide
Fefu’s original observation holds up where he said it would. Total output, overall rate, decisive contributions—there’s a real case that these two players have produced comparable headline numbers in Turin.
But the surface is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Higuaín produced against better opponents. He engineered his own shooting positions through intelligent movement, finding space between defenders rather than contesting the most crowded zones in the box. And when high-quality chances arrived, he converted them at an elite rate — outperforming his SxG by 12.3 over three seasons.
Vlahovic has actually been presented with better chances by SxG — 42.5 to Higuaín’s 34.7. What he hasn’t done is convert that opportunity at the same rate, or produce consistently when the opponent quality rises. But as we’ve established, that gap is almost entirely a 2024/25 story. Strip out that outlier season and you have a striker who tracks his expected output closely, converts high-quality chances at roughly the rate the model predicts, and exceeds expectations on difficult shots.
So what does Juventus actually need to replace?
A striker who generated elite-quality chances — 42.5 SxG across 4 1/2 seasons, nearly identical on a per-season basis to one of the best finishers in the club’s recent history. One who scored decisive goals at a respectable clip and held his own against the sides where margins are thin. The flaws are real and documented — the opponent quality drop-off is significant, and 2024/25 was a collapse across every dimension of his finishing. But the baseline, in normal seasons, was a striker tracking his expected output and doing the things a reliable number nine needs to do.
That’s not nothing. And it’s not easily replaced. Juventus manager Luciano Spalletti has made his feelings very clear about what Vlahovic — or someone like him — brings to the table. When the coach is making that case publicly, it tells you something about how hard this hole is going to be to fill.
The market will offer options. David is younger and cheaper, and has shown creative promise without yet proving himself as a pure goal scorer at this level. Others will emerge. But whoever comes next inherits a specific problem: Juventus don’t just need goals, they need a striker who can generate and convert high-quality chances against the sides that matter most — the top four, the European nights, the games where the gap in class doesn’t do the work for you.
Vlahovic never fully solved that problem. But he was closer to solving it than the perception suggests — and the perception, as this analysis hopefully shows, has never been a reliable guide to what the numbers actually say.
