We are just a couple of days from the official midpoint in the month of August. Once that arrives, it means that the summer transfer window will officially hit its final stretch, with there likely to be a flurry of deals to be made even if we know Juventus might not be overly active because of how quiet things have been of late.
As this post is published, it is the 13th day of August.
On that 13th day of August, Dusan Vlahovic is still a Juventus player.
The market for Vlahovic is looking, well, not great. Better yet, it might even be completely non-existent considering the simple fact that so many other strikers have moved to new clubs this summer and Vlahovic has barely gotten a sniff from those clubs who have decided to bring in some new blood.
By all accounts, this a lot of Vlahovic’s own making. At least when it comes to how the market around him has developed this summer — Juventus would have loved to have offloaded the 25-year-old striker by now, but he has refused just about every single offer (even though there hasn’t been many of them) to come his way and is ready to stay at the club for the 2025-26 season, according to La Gazzetta dello Sport. And let us not forget that this is also a striker who makes a Serie A-high €12 million net this coming season and it’s that same salary plus the lack of production for that kind of money that has led us to this point and has Gazzetta pondering a question that we will essentially repeat here …
Could all of this mean that … gulp … Vlahovic might actually stay at Juventus and see out the final season of his extremely expensive contract even though he knows full well he’s not going to be a starter?
At this point, it seems as though we have to consider all possibilities even if we don’t like the final outcome of many of them. We know that Juventus 10 times out of 10 will pick the door that results in Vlahovic leaving and that massive salary coming off their books even if it’s now down just one season’s worth. But this summer has shown us that said proposition is looking harder and harder to see happen than even the most optimistic of folks might have thought. We’ve heard that Juventus have considered terminating Vlahovic’s contract even if it means taking a decent financial hit to part ways with him a year early.
Heck, even the talk of AC Milan being interested in Vlahovic continues to pop up every so often, but it always come with the very obvious caveat that they can’t afford him at the current amount of money in which he is paid at Juventus.
That has all led us to where we are today — a place in which Vlahovic actually leaving Juventus before the summer mercato comes to a close looks like a giant question mark if there ever was one.
But … what if a market doesn’t ever develop? You know, like we’ve seen take place the entire spring and now into the summertime in which somebody wouldn’t have to pay all that much to get Juventus to bite.
Based on Juventus’ first two friendlies of the summer, Vlahovic is clearly playing second fiddle to Jonathan David, the 25-year-old Canadian who the Bianconeri courted for the better part of the last year before he eventually signed on a “free” transfer last month. Vlahovic played less than half an hour against Borussia Dortmund this past weekend, providing more than just one or two frustrating moments despite not seeing much of the ball. And if Randal Kolo Muani eventually comes back to Juventus during the final couple of weeks of the summer window, then that will certainly spell even less potential playing time for Vlahovic.
To his credit, Vlahovic has not been much of a off-field problem during this summer of complete uncertainty. There haven’t been any sort of Douglas Luiz-like issues when preseason training first got underway or anything like that. (I know, I know, he has since apologized, but the fact still remains he didn’t turn up on the day he was supposed to because he wanted to force a move out of the club.)
But the fact still remains that we don’t know what’s going to happen with him or if any sort of market will actually develop as we hit the middle of August.
Or, we can just say what Gazzetta said to wrap this up because it seems so appropriate at this moment: Vlahovic’s situation is “a tug-of-war that benefits no one and is stalling the Old Lady’s transfer window.” Yep, there is no better way to describe it — and we don’t know when (or if) it will actually end before September arrives.