Player Focus: Arturo Vidal

Here, there, Arturo Vidal was everywhere. So much so that La Gazzetta dello Sport claimed he wasn’t a footballer, but an illusionist. The pink paper’s reasoning was simple: against Lazio on Monday night, the Juventus midfielder gave the appearance he was in two places at once. 

Journalists in the press box at the Stadio Olimpico joked that they were seeing double. What system were Juventus playing again? 3-5-1-1 or 3-5-2-1? They might as well have had an extra man. Yet there was no trickery to Vidal’s ubiquity. 

This is a player who, perhaps more than anyone else at Juventus, exemplifies coach Antonio Conte’s “Eat Grass” philosophy. One could argue that not since the legs and lungs of Pavel Nedved, a different kind of player, I admit, has the team had someone capable of covering so much ground to say nothing of running opponents into it. 

A glance at Vidal’s heat map from the season’s Serie A games gives an indication of his range of action. It has a perfect storm quality to it. There’s nowhere to hide. No escaping his clutches.  Either that or it looks in relative size and shape a bit like Australia only with Vidal as a Tasmanian devil across on a visit from Tassie. 

A whirlwind of energy and hyper activity, there was a moment midway through the second half of Monday night’s trip to Lazio that epitomized Vidal. A ball came loose on the edge of the Juventus penalty area. He slid to recover it, got up and then went on the charge, beating one man, then a second and a third before offloading it, even gesturing to whom his teammate should pass it. 

Any normal person would by then have felt the burn of lactic acid building up in their muscles and relented. Not Vidal. He just gritted his teeth and got on with it. No wonder they call him El Guerrero or The Warrior back in his native Chile. 

That fighting spirit, his grinta, makes Vidal the prototypical Juventus player, one in whom Conte can see himself again, but - and this is written with all due respect - there’s more to Vidal’s game than there was his own. Spend time thinking about this team, and what defines it – the work ethic, the pressing, the never say die attitude – and it’s built as much if not more in Vidal’s image than, say, Andrea Pirlo’s.

Note the word “image,” not importance. 

Pirlo is absolutely fundamental to Juventus and was quite correctly identified as the principal difference between them and the rest of Serie A last season. Without Vidal and Claudio Marchisio in front of him, though, he wouldn’t have been able to do his best work, which, given how much of Juventus’ game is built around midfield runners, is also to get the best out of them. It’s a two-way thing. They’re dependent on each other.

But, for me, Vidal represents Conte’s Juventus as well as anyone. What that’s about is beating your opponent to every ball, taking it off him, bossing the game, imposing yourself on it and showing that you want it more.

Only Torino centre-back Matteo Darmian has made as many tackles per game as Vidal in Serie A this season [5.2]. And only Napoli midfielder Valon Behrami [145] and his Genoa counterpart Juraj ‘the Tank’ Kucka [135] have thrown themselves into as many challenges as him [134] over the campaign as a whole. 

It’s what Vidal does next, though, that separates him from the rest. He follows the play, makes sure he gets into the opponent’s penalty area and either sets up a teammate to score or does so himself. His second against Lazio on Tuesday night is a perfect example.  

At this stage, Vidal has more assists than any other Juventus player in Serie A games this season, with 7, and is their second highest scorer in all competitions, with 12. No one with 10 or more goals plus assists in Serie A has made anywhere near as many tackles and interceptions [170] as he has done. He is the complete midfield package.

Look more closely at the 19 goals Vidal has scored for Juventus over the last 18 months and you gain an appreciation of just how decisive a player he is to his team. 

Six have come when the scoreline was 0-0 and broke the deadlock. Eight have come when Juventus were 1-0 up and looking to put the game beyond opponents. One came when his team were 2-1 down in the Italian Super Cup in Beijing and was the equaliser that sent the game to extra-time and penalties, which Juventus won. Another was at Stamford Bridge in September, which grabbed his team a foothold in the game and allowed them to clamber back from 2-0 down to record a 2-2 draw with Chelsea, the Champions League holders.

In light of all that, you can no doubt understand why there’s reported interest from Real Madrid, Manchester City, Paris Saint Germain and Bayern Munich. 

Arguments have been made as to why Juventus should sell. Here’s how they go: Valued at €30m to €35m, there’s a notable profit to be made on their initial €10m outlay. They have replacements in-house: Paul Pogba is ready to step up and Andrea Poli is apparently likely to join in the summer. The money Juventus earn, in addition to the mooted sales of Alessandro Matri and Fabio Quagliarella, will be used to sign the fabled ‘top player’ – the Sergio Aguero or Robin van Persie they’ve missed out on in recent years. 

It’d be a real gamble, one that - at least from what Juventus are saying - it appears they’re not prepared to risk. General manager Beppe Marotta insists “we’re not a selling club” and talks to extend Vidal’s existing contract beyond 2016 are anticipated. Conte’s response to the speculation was as follows: “If we want to build an important team we need to keep the best elements. To be deprived of some of my players would be tough.” 

Everyone has a price, though, as Juventus supporters are only too aware. Back in 2001, they looked on as the club sold Zinedine Zidane to Real Madrid for a then world record fee of €75m and then used the proceeds to buy Gigi Buffon and Lilian Thuram from Parma and Nedved from Lazio that same summer. If that’s the example Juventus intend to follow, so be it. 

To state the obvious Vidal isn’t Zidane, but he is a history maker, an integral part of the team that went unbeaten in Serie A last season and looks likely to retain its title this term. Were King Artur, as he’s known, to be sold, it would be a shame, a move that’d be mourned by his subjects in the Curva at the Juventus Stadium. And while there’s a temptation to say long may he reign in Turin, the truth is that over the coming months we may just have to watch the throne.