By Tony Attwod
Viktor Gyökeres has always been a special case in terms of his transfer, simply because as we have noted in many previous articles, he scored 97 goals in 102 games.
Yet in 2018 he went from Brommapojkarna to Brighton for under £1m, a fee which Transfermarkt reckon was twice his actual value.
Brighton clearly didn’t rate him as ready as they loaned him to first Swansea and then Coventry before selling him to Coventry for around £1m. Coventry did get something out of him, however, and then sold him to Sporting Lisbon for about £20m; a handy profit.
He’s now 27 and Arsenal have bought him for around £63m and around another £9 add-ons if he performs and doesn’t get injured. At the same time, reports say that Arsenal are about to buy or indeed have just bought a centre-half Cristhian Mosquera from Valencia. Here the fees are a bit lower, being around £13m.
The reporting suggests it was the issue of add-ons that caused all the problems but Arsenal, we are told, didn’t want them. The add ons were based on appearances, goals and assists by Gyökeres, plus Champions League qualification, whereas Arsenal had wanted to include some more difficult ones which only came into play if Gyökeres continued his recent form – form that could well help Arsenal win the League for the first time since the Unbeaten Season.
In 2003/4 as you might recall Thierry Henry scored a total of 39 goals – the highest goal achievement since Ted Drake in 1935, when the League season contained four more games. Last season the top scorer was Kai Havertz with 15. My guess is that Havertz will stay so that Gyökeres will be given time to adapt both to the ways of the Arsenal team and the ways of English referees, which as we know, are somewhat idiosyncratic.
In this transfer saga it seems Gyökeres was determined to sell the player to Arsenal, ignoring interest from elsewhere; Sporting would not budge on their financial demands. Gyökeres reportedly refused to return for training this pre-season. It was one of those situations.
That probably is the end of the big deals as we have seen Kepa Arrizabalaga, Martín Zubimendi, Christian Nørgaard and Noni Madueke all arrive for around £100m – maybe more.
The big problem however was that Gyökeres was extraordinary in his last couple of years in scoring for Sporting, (you will see reference to the 97 goals in 102 games in most of the reports). But of course, it hasn’t always been like this for the player – his headline achievements have only come in the last couple of years in Portugal. Which is probably why Arsenal have held their position in the discussions for a long time.
Newspaper reports suggest that in the negotiations, both sides took up strong “we are not moving from this” positions, but that Arsenal gave in. But since that is what they always say the usual pinches of salt can be thrown around.
And yet in spite of all this, Coventry only got £20m or so for him before he went to Sporting. (who then went on to win the league). That sounds a bit odd in itself until we remember that the last time any club outside of the big three won the league was 2002.
But still in the last two seasons he did score 29 and 39 goals respectively. But refereeing is different in Portugal – a factor you won’t even seen debated, let alone asserted in the English media.
However there is one worrying point. While the man we have just signed scored even more goals last season than the season before, the number of goals scored and the number of points gained by the club actually declined. It looks as if the whole team was giving him the ball, rather than take shots themselves. I wonder what on earth the defences in the Premier League are going to make of him; it is possible they will try and mark and foul him ouot of every game, relying on PGMO to help in this regard. For that reason if no other, Arsenal need to have their alternative goal scorers ready to knock the ball home, with the defenders looking elsewhere.
And here’s another thought. Even though Arsenal’s goal-scoring abilities collapsed last year under the impact of injuries, the club only dropped from second second-highest scoring team to third third-highest. If our new man can add the 20 or so goals those who have been calling for a striker say we missed out on last season, we could be back to 90+ goals a season.
Haaland broke the record for the most goals scored by one player in a season in the Premier League when he got 36 in 2022/23. Maybe that total is now in Arsenal’s sights.
And there could be more dealing in the next day or two if Arsenal are able to conclude the deal for a new centre-half: Cristhian Mosquera from Valencia. The price is said to be around £13m.
Maybe credit to the media reporting on the Gyökeres deal?
Or maybe you can’t?
To credit them would be a little strange since then logically we’d have to credit ourselves since I we reported on it before it happened as well.
Depends if the refs are involved. It will be good at the end of the season when the supports club meet with the members of the Arsenal to ask them if they noticed how refs did their job when they are at Arsenal compared to their previous clubs.