It is not the typical admission of a top footballer, at least not in public. But then Guglielmo Vicario has not exactly followed a conventional path. When the Tottenham goalkeeper was at the beginning of his career, aged 18, in his first season at senior level, he says that Friday nights tended to mean one thing – nightclubbing.
They were the days when Vicario, who has taken the Premier League by storm since his £16.4m move from Empoli last June, was fighting for recognition – and Serie D survival – with Fontanafredda, a club in Italy’s north-east corner, which had never previously played so high.
Vicario was on loan from Udinese, where he could not break through, and had dropped a long way down in a bid to slingshot his way back up, into the semi-professional game where most of his teammates had normal jobs.
“Someone worked in a bank, someone else was a construction worker so big respects to what they did and what they are still doing because they are still playing football and working,” Vicario says. “It is a massive commitment. It’s not easy to do both.
“We trained four times during the week, we played on Sundays and every Friday night we used to have a dinner, all together, and then go clubbing. Because some lads didn’t work on Saturday and so were off. It was a big moment to be together and we had a big season, achieving our goal because we didn’t get relegated. It was a big achievement for us and a very important experience for my life.”
Vicario’s next challenge comes at Manchester United on Sunday, when the rival goalkeepers will be a sub-plot. André Onana also transferred from Serie A last summer, leaving Internazionale for Old Trafford, where he has fared rather less well.
Vicario has done what Onana was supposed to do: help to drive a cohesive build-from-the-very-back style and provide a secure last line of defence. Unlike Onana, the 27-year-old did not arrive with a reputation for using the ball with his feet. But before the weekend’s fixtures, Opta statistics had him first for the number of successful goalkicks and second for keeper-sweeper interventions.
Where Vicario has truly excelled has been with his hands, positioning and reflexes. He has made no errors that have led to goals and just two that have led to shots, while his “goals prevented” number of 6.74 is another competition high. He has been nominated for save of the month every month.
It is all the more remarkable when you consider that Vicario made his Serie A debut in April 2021 for Cagliari against Inter and he was not a regular in Italy’s top division until the following season when he went to Empoli.
After Fontanafredda in 2014-15, he had another season on loan from Udinese in Serie D, this time with Venezia when the club were promoted. But after a permanent move there, he was mainly out of the team over the next two seasons; the first featured another promotion to Serie B.
In 2018-19, having established himself as Venezia’s first-choice, he and the team suffered heartbreak when they lost on penalties to Salernitana in the Serie B playoff semi-finals. He went to Cagliari, who loaned him to Perugia, where he was again the starting No 1 and was again part of a team that lost on penalties in the Serie B playoff semi-finals, this time to Pescara.
For Vicario there had to have been periods – and prolonged ones – when he thought he would not make it among the elite. “Yes, but I always tried not to overthink my future, just to concentrate on my daily stuff,” he says. “Also to analyse keepers who were doing better; you try to steal things from them. When I didn’t play [at Venezia] it was an important period for me because I could watch other keepers and try to stay in one mindset – to try to develop myself as a keeper and as a man.”
Vicario has excellent English and is warm and easy company; amusing at times, too. After he holds an impromptu workshop on how to pronounce his Christian name, it is agreed that it is not an easy one for the non-Italian speaker. So what do his teammates call him? “Vic,” he replies.
Beneath the cool and composed exterior, the fires burn. They were perhaps more evident on the pitch in previous years, he admits, with how he lived one game in particular earning him the nickname of Venom. As an aside, he went by a different sobriquet before that.
“At the start, the Venezia supporters called me Tegoina, which means green bean,” he says. “I was very tall and very skinny, I wore a green kit and so I looked like one from far away.”
The episode with his teammate Ryan Sessegnon after the recent FA Cup win over Burnley showed how Venom can still make an appearance. Spurs had almost conceded in the final minute of stoppage-time following a corner and Vicario could be seen making an impassioned point to Sessegnon.
“Maybe it was not the best thing to do,” Vicario admits. “If you have to say something, the right way is to do it in the dressing room. It was just about the structure we had in the set pieces, we were not set well. I was angry because it was the last ball and they had a good chance. I can’t put the blame on Sess, of course. It’s just to keep your attention high. So it’s about mentality and just not wanting to concede.”
Vicario had no doubt about what he had to do when Spurs called. “I said that I would have walked here if needed and signed in my own blood,” he says. “It was my way of saying that it was an opportunity I couldn’t miss.
“So I was ready to come from Italy to the UK walking. Or running. And if I had no pen or anything, I would have signed in blood, cutting myself and signing with my own blood.”
Vicario talks about two Italy World Cup-winning goalkeepers – his boyhood hero, Gianluigi Buffon, and Dino Zoff who, like him, hails from the Udine region. “I had Buffon’s shirt on the wall over my bed, a friend of mine gave it to me as a gift 15 years ago,” he says.
As Vicario makes his way in the Italy setup, it is certainly a thrill to rub shoulders with Buffon, who was appointed as the Italian Football Federation’s head of delegation last August. Vicario has been in every squad since September 2022 when fit, although he has yet to win his first cap. He is the third choice behind Paris Saint-Germain’s Gianluigi Donnarumma and Napoli’s Alex Meret.
“I had the pleasure to meet Dino Zoff once,” Vicario adds. “He said to me: ‘I follow you all the time. I’m very proud of you because you started at the bottom and now you are in the top league.’ I phoned him when he turned 81 [last February]. He was very surprised about that and a little bit emotional.”
It is when the conversation turns to another World Cup-winning goalkeeper that the scale of Vicario’s impact at Spurs is underscored. Hugo Lloris was a club mainstay for 11 years, one of its symbols. How could somebody with only two seasons in Serie A possibly replace him? Nobody is asking the question now.
