Dusan Vlahovic aims to join Mbappe and Haaland in Champions League super-striker elite

By the time Kylian Mbappe had turned 22, he had racked up 22 goals in the most glamorous of club competitions. Erling Haaland will only turn 22 in July. He already has 23 Champions League goals to his name.

In the age of the precocious super-striker, there is some catching up to do for the third member of a cohort of forwards earmarked to set records at the elite level of their sport for the next decade - or, as it’s sometimes put, in what will be football’s post-Messi-and-Ronaldo era.

This evening Dusan Vlahovic belatedly takes to the Champions League stage, making his debut in the competition. He’ll be wearing Ronaldo’s old Juventus jersey and carrying into the compact surroundings of Villarreal’s Ceramica stadium the biggest price-tag from the last transfer window.

Juventus committed €70m, with further €10m in add-ons, to sign Vlahovic from Fiorentina just as he approached his 22nd birthday last month. They came out ahead in a jostle of suitors, among the most determined being Arsenal, and the size of the fee, along with the decision of the player to opt for Juve, signalled a vote of confidence in a club whose fortunes have waned in the past 18 months.

This season, like last, is developing in a battle to finish in Serie A’s top four, a modest target for the winners of nine of the last 10 scudetti, Italian titles. Nor have Juventus’s dealings in the transfer market over recent summers - or winters - greatly polished the club’s high reputation as shrewd recruiters of good-value assets.

Having dedicated a vast chunk of their budget to signing Cristiano Ronaldo in 2018 with the declaration he would be the missing piece of a jigsaw that featured a long-awaited Champions League triumph, they let Ronaldo go, at a loss, last