Tottenham goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario played a key role in the club finishing in fifth in the 2023/24 season and qualifying for the Europa League, as he proved to be an immediate upgrade, transitioning well from keeping Empoli afloat in Serie A to competing at the highest level of the Premier League.
Prior to an injury, Vicario began the season so well that he was one of the top goalkeepers in the Premier League. And overall, he's had a strong statistical second season in the Premier League with 4.7 post-shot expected goals prevented, which would actually be the best mark of his career since becoming a first division player in Italy in 2020.
Now 28 years old, the Udine native is entering his theoretical prime, but in the last two matches for Tottenham, Vicario has begun to show more of the issues that have occasionally cropped up in his young career. He cost the team against Wolves and Nottingham Forest, surrending two goals in each game on pure goalkeeping errors.
Guglielmo Vicario is a poor man's Keylor Navas
In each game, he made one error by flailing helplessly at a cross that he should not have even went for, and then he also made a mistake in each game in which he was too weak with his hands at parrying a shot that most top goalkeepers would be able to divert.
Vicario's unorthodox, cat-like style is reminiscent of Keylor Navas, who won three Champions League titles at Real Madrid but eventually wore out his welcome in favor of a more positionally and technically sound shot-stopper in Thibaut Courtois. And the thing about Vicario is that while he is talented, he is not as statistically solid or as acrobatic as Navas was.
Actually, some of Vicario's numbers this season for Tottenham are underwhelming. For example, he doesn't even have a 70 percent save percentage. His mark of 69.9 is an improvement from his record of 67.7 in his first season with Tottenham, but neither number is particularly inspiring.
Tottenham should look at high-upside young keepers
Vicario is a good goalkeeper and isn't someone Tottenham should be thinking about replacing in 2025 with so many bigger needs, but at a position in which consistency is highly valued, Vicario making four basic errors to cost the team points in back-to-back league games is worth noting. Detractors of Vicario are often too harsh and ignore all the highly positive plays he makes to prevent goals, and, statistically, Vicario's good plays have significantly outweighed the bad.
Again, Vicario is a good goalkeeper. But because he is so unorthodox and not confident in his handling, parrying, or command of the box, the spectacular stops may get overshadowed by high-profile mistakes if Tottenham are able to improve their squad enough to start going into the knockout stages of the Champions League. If VIcario makes mistakes in high-stakes matches - not just ones against Wolves and Forest with the club sitting in the bottom five of the table - these conversations will begin in ernst.
It's just something to tuck away for the future. Tottenham should continue to back Vicario as their starter and view him as an above-average player at the position, but they should know that his issues mean he has a capped ceiling on how far he can go with Tottenham as a starter. It would behoove Spurs to keep one eye on the horizon for younger keepers with more traditional playing styles and attributes who have world-class upside.
And the upside part is important, since Spurs can gamble on a high-upside player, knowing that Vicario will be good for the next several years but may eventually need to be replaced by someone world-class if Spurs are able to get to that level. That's, sadly, a sizeable "if", but teams with aspirations should always think of themselves that way; you have to start with that mentality, after all, when squad planning in order to eventually end up there.