View: Guglielmo Vicario already showing his worth at Tottenham
For so long Hugo Lloris was a mainstay between the sticks at Tottenham, so much so he was practically part of the furniture at the club.
The France World Cup winner might as well literally be part of the furniture nowadays, though. The 36-year-old was deposed as captain and widely expected to leave the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in the summer.
A move failed to materialise, though, and while he was registered in Ange Postecoglou’s 25-man squad, it would take quite an unfortunate series of events for him to get a look in again now.
So, it was a case of out with the old and in with the new and the man Spurs chose as Lloris’ long-term successor was Guglielmo Vicario – a £17.2million signing from Serie A side Empoli (TNT Sports, 27 June).
By and large the Italian has been viewed as a successful piece of transfer business by Spurs and given they sit top of the table after eight games and he arrived for a relative bargain by today’s prices it is hard to argue that.
But just how good has he been?
If you were ranking it on a scale of one to 10, you’d probably go for around a seven. If you were Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, you might describe Vicario as pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty…pretty good.
Using Wyscout data, we looked at some of the key numbers involving Vicario against other Premier League goalkeepers in 2023-24 so far (min. of four games played).
In terms of the basics, he has made 27 saves so far this season, ranking him seventh in the league – quite a high ranking for a team so high in the league who you would expect to be lower in terms of the amount of shots at goal they concede. When looking at saves per 90, he remains seventh with 2.91.
A sign of Vicario’s importance comes when looking at goals prevented. Here, the Italian ranks in sixth having prevented 1.8 goals and 0.19 per 90. Having a reliable goalkeeper has been the key to countless title successes over the years, and Vicario being on the plus side of prevented goals is something that will make or break Tottenham’s chances of a prolonged battle for the trophy.
The two images above from Spurs’ win over Liverpool show the sort of impact Vicario is having. In the first, he gets down low to make a close-range stop from Cody Gakpo, and in the second he has immediately leapt up to keep out Andrew Robertson’s near-post drive on the rebound.
Of course, modern goalkeepers are not just about keeping the ball out of the goal (even if that is naturally their primary aim…) but they are expected to almost act as another outfield player, be good with their feet, and start the build-up of an attack.
Certainly that is what you would expect from a goalkeeper playing under Postecoglou, given his penchant for attracting, free-flowing football, and a coach who gives his players the freedom to express themselves and play out of the back.
Here is an area where you might feel Vicario still has a little room for improvement. He has a pass accuracy rate of 87.08, which is only 13th among Premier League goalkeepers. He plays on average 13.56 passes forward per game, placing him 10th, and Postecoglou may want to see just a touch more positivity in the pass from his number one.
However, Vicario is clearly avoiding the temptation to go long and take the easy route. He makes 6.67 long passes per 90 minutes, placing him 15th in the league, and has an average pass length of 26.12 metres – 18th in the top flight.
The chart above shows Vicario’s goals conceded against his expected goals conceded rate, and as you can see he by and large concedes fewer than he would be expected to. Perhaps most pertinently is the fact that two of Vicario’s best games have come against fellow top-six sides.
It was against Manchester United where Vicario had an expected goals against rate of 2.12 but kept a clean sheet in a 2-0 victory, while in the dramatic 2-1 triumph over Liverpool he had an expected goals against rate of 1.27 and let in only one – albeit there was the small matter of a perfectly legitimate goal for Luis Diaz ruled out for offside (not that anyone really noticed, eh?).
We are, of course, still only eight games into the season so the sample size for now remains relatively small. But the early indications are that Tottenham have a goalkeeper well capable of making a huge difference in their quest to compete in the upper echelons of the table and compete for major honours.
In other Tottenham news, Destiny Udogie endured a difficult night on international duty for Italy against England.