Juventus and Dusan Vlahovic will go their separate ways this summer after the striker failed to agree a new deal with the club. The split leaves one of Serie A's most recognizable forwards on the market for nothing.
That is a sharp turn for a player who has spent just over four years in Turin and scored 68 times in 168 outings for Juventus. The club paid £66million to bring him in from Fiorentina after he had scored 41 times in a season and a half there, a move that once looked like a long-term bet on a striker built to carry the line.
The timing matters because Vlahovic is now available at the exact point clubs always dream about: after the fee has disappeared. Juventus have not been able to bridge the gap in salary expectations with the 2024 Serie A best striker, and that has ended any realistic chance of keeping him beyond the summer.
Luciano Spalletti wanted the club to keep him and did not hide the damage his exit would do. He said Juventus had suffered the loss of Vlahovic like bread and butter, and added that you cannot play without someone with his physical threat and goals. He also said the club had tried to make contact over a renewal and would try again, because that was what he had been told by the directors.
That push, though, was not enough to close a gap that had been visible for some time. Juventus may have valued him highly, but the player and club were some way apart on salary, and the talks never reached the point where a new contract could be signed. Once that stalemate hardened, a departure this summer became the only outcome that made sense.
For Arsenal, the opening is obvious. They were linked with Vlahovic in January 2022, but Sky Sports reported that the transfer fee put them off at the time, even though he wanted to play for a Champions League club and Arsenal had not qualified for the competition in the four seasons before that window. Juventus, by contrast, were regulars in the Champions League then, which helped explain why the move happened the way it did.
Now the calculation is different. Arsenal are looking to add more quality in attack after losing to PSG, and a forward who has already proved himself in Italy without a transfer fee attached will attract attention fast. That is especially true after they signed Viktor Gyokeres for £64m 12 months ago, only to see him score more than 20 times in his debut season and still end up on the bench in crunch games, including the Champions League final.
What happens next is the part no one has pinned down yet. Juventus have decided they will not keep Vlahovic, and there is no confirmed buyer in place, which means a 25-year-old striker with 68 Juventus goals and a recent individual award is about to test the market in the one way clubs cannot ignore.
