Striker moves are prompting more striker moves: Here’s how top Premier League clubs net out

This summer, everyone wanted a striker.

First, Chelsea signed Liam Delap from Ipswich Town and João Pedro from Brighton. Then Arsenal signed Viktor Gyökeres from Sporting CP, and Liverpool signed Hugo Ekitike from Eintracht Frankfurt. Then Liverpool tried to sign Alexander Isak from Newcastle, before he publicly stated he no longer wants to play for Newcastle.

Except, Newcastle were about to sign Ekitike, a strikingly similar player to Isak, until Liverpool jumped in. So, Newcastle didn’t have an Isak replacement — instead he was playing for the team that was also trying to acquire Isak.

So, Newcastle tried to get Benjamin Sesko from RB Leipzig — but the same thing happened. A bigger club, Manchester United, got involved, and Sesko went there instead. Of course, United never would’ve signed Sesko had they landed someone like Delap, Gyökeres, or Ekitike earlier in the window.

Someone like the athletic and chaotic Darwin Núñez would’ve been a nice fit at Eddie Howe’s run-in-transition Newcastle, but Liverpool wouldn’t move a player to a Premier League rival. However, Núñez’s main suitor, Napoli, couldn’t afford Liverpool’s transfer ask and the player’s salary request, so he instead moved to Al Hilal in Saudi Arabia.

Put another way: Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund gave Liverpool €53 million to sign a player to Al Hilal that Liverpool are trying to replace with another player who plays for another team owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, in Newcastle.

If Isak’s move to Liverpool is going to happen, it might still happen because Chelsea signed two players that Newcastle tried to sign earlier this summer, Delap and Pedro, which means that Nicolas Jackson has fallen down the pecking order at Chelsea and might be available for Newcastle to sign.

It might not happen, though, because Manchester United also signed support forwards Bryan Mbeumo from Brentford and Matheus Cunha from Wolves, so Brentford don’t want to lose Yoane Wissa, whom Newcastle also want, and Wolves don’t want to lose Jørgen Strand Larsen, whom Newcastle also want, but Brentford did just acquire Dango Ouattara from Bournemouth, so maybe …

Meanwhile, Napoli’s Victor Osimhen, who is 26 and finished eighth in Ballon d’Or voting two years ago, moved for €75 million last month — to play for Galatasaray in the Turkish Lig.

There’s been a lot of inter-connected striker movement this summer, and if one more move happens, a bunch of other moves might immediately happen, too. But amid all of the strikers swapping shirts this summer, there remains one nagging question: Did any of these teams get any better?

Here are three nameless players, along with their attacking stats from last season:

• Player A: age-22 season, 0.51 non-penalty goals+assists per 90 minutes, 0.48 expected goals+assists
• Player B: age-21 season, 0.42 non-penalty goals+assists, 0.34 expected goals+assists
• Player C: age-23 season, 0.61 non-penalty goals+assists, 0.67 expected goals+assists

So, you’ve got two pre-prime players that scored and created an average or slightly below-average number of goals, and they did so with slightly worse underlying production. Then you’ve got another player who is about to enter his prime, who scored and created an above-average number of goals with even better underlying production.

You probably know where this is going: Player A is Pedro, Player B is Delap, and Player C is Jackson. And while Pedro definitely does more in possession than Jackson, I’m not sure you can make a convincing argument that it outweighs the gap in production in front of goal.

Now, this doesn’t mean that Pedro won’t be better than Jackson at Chelsea — he’s started off real well, with four goals in his first five appearance — but there’s not much outside of the randomness of the sport and human athletic performance more broadly that suggests he will be. Delap, meanwhile, is much more of a project than either of the other two, and his lower transfer fee suggests as much.

Chelsea might be better this year. Through two games, though, I already suspect it might be because of a different player from any of the new strikers. He’s only 18 and he’s only started one match, but their new Brazilian winger Estêvão has created a combined 1.5 expected goals and assists — more than all but five other players in the league.

On the one hand, Gyökeres has two goals in his first two Premier League starts. Keep that rate up, and he’ll break Erling Haaland’s single-season record.

On the other hand, Gyökeres has attempted two non-penalty shots in his first two Premier League starts. Keep that rate up, and he’ll end the season with as many shots as Arsenal’s emergency No. 9, midfielder Mikel Merino, attempted last year.

Although he might’ve felt like more of a sure-thing as a 27-year-old, Gyökeres was a massive risk almost precisely because he’s a 27-year-old. We still hadn’t seen Gyökeres play in one of Europe’s Big Five top leagues — let alone play well. Plus, a huge proportion of his goals for Sporting Lisbon came against teams in the lower half of the Portuguese league, i.e. teams that would be fighting off relegation in England’s second division.

It’s still way too early to say anything definitive. Arsenal’s performance against Manchester United in the opener was so stylistically different than anything we’ve seen under manager Mikel Arteta in recent years that it seems like the team is trying out something new, and perhaps not immediately trying to optimize their performance. There were growing pains up, down, and across the field in that match.

Through two matches, Gyökeres has looked quite clunky on the ball, and he’s been really poor in possession — potential weaknesses that wouldn’t have been stress-tested in Portugal. If I were trying to predict whether this move would succeed or fail, I’d move the percentages slightly more toward “fail” after the first two matches, but only slightly.

I also think that the first two matches put this whole puzzle into perspective. Arsenal were such a good team already that it’s really hard to find players who can improve the roster. But since Arsenal were such a good team already, it means that their marquee offseason striker signing can attempt just two shots over two matches, and they can still win those two matches by a combined scoreline of 6-0.

You can take those same ideas and apply them to Liverpool. When you’re one of the best two or three teams in the world, it’s really hard to get better. And if you take a step back and look at Liverpool’s summer, it doesn’t necessarily even look like they were trying to get better for this season. No, everyone they’ve signed so far is 24 and under. They’re trying to make this team better for the next five to seven seasons.

But: the strikers. For all of his warts, Núñez leaves Liverpool with a rate of 0.70 non-penalty goals+assists per 90 minutes, backed up by an elite 0.87 expected goals+assists rate. But even with all the wayward finishing, 0.7 G+A per 90 is “starter on a Champions League contender”-level production.

If it wasn’t Darwin, then Luis Díaz was frequently playing as a makeshift striker last season, and he did just about everything: scored and created goals, progressed the ball up field, pressed like mad, and rarely ever lost possession. Moving on the 28-year-old Diaz made sense from a team-building perspective, but that doesn’t mean that Liverpool didn’t also lose one of the best attackers in the league.

And then there was the shocking and tragic death of Diogo Jota. When he was playing regularly, he was one of the most productive forwards in the world. He’s gone, way too soon.

Liverpool got younger with the move for Ekitike, and he has two goals and an assist through his first two matches. But the moves for him and Florian Wirtz aren’t necessarily about improving Liverpool’s attack; they’re about maintaining its level well into the future.

If Liverpool do get Alexander Isak, too, then there is a world where manager Arne Slot figures out a set up that gets him, Wirtz, Ekitike, and Mohamed Salah on the field together, and it works, and they’re near-unstoppable. On paper, too, I could be convinced that those attackers are more talented than last year’s group.

But in practice — especially with how imbalanced and dysfunctional the team has looked over its first few matches of this new iteration — it’s hard to see how spending €300 million on two center forwards doesn’t quickly hit a point of diminishing returns.

I feel pretty confident in saying Manchester United are better than last year because it’s almost impossible for them to be as bad as last year. But are they going to be better because of the striker they’ve signed?

While United signed Matheus Cunha and Mbeumo after career years in front of goal — both finished their chances at rates they’re incredibly unlikely to repeat — they’re each in-their-prime, productive, above-average Premier League attackers. They won’t be a part of whatever the next great Manchester United team might be, but they’re going to improve an attack that scored fewer goals than all but four other teams in the league last year.

As for Benjamin Sesko, the potential outcomes are everywhere. In FBref’s database, which goes back to the early 90’s, 163 players have scored and assisted at least 30 goals before their age-22 seasons in one of the Big Five leagues. At the top, it’s Kylian Mbappé with 142. At the bottom, it’s a group of players that includes Aaron Lennon, Florent Sinama-Pongolle, Alexis Sánchez, Phillipe Coutinho, Salomón Rondón, Stephen Ireland, Nicklas Bendtner, and Rafael Leão.

Sesko has 34 goals+assists — the same amount as Real Madrid’s Rodrygo and Chelsea’s Cole Palmer had at the same age, and the same that Lewis Holtby and Luka Jovic had at the same age, too. The higher you go on the list of goals+assists, the more likely a player is to have a great career. But despite his physical tools, the 22-year-old Sesko just hasn’t had anywhere near the production he would’ve needed to have for us to be confident he’ll be a star or even a solid squad player for Manchester United.

Put another way: He could be the next Luka Jovic, he could be the next Alexis Sanchez, or he could be the next Nicklas Bendtner.

They lost Callum Wilson over the summer. Isak is still refusing to play. And they haven’t signed any center forwards.

In the long run, if Isak stays, starts to play, and starts to play like his old self, then they’ll be better than they are right now. But as they’ve whiffed on player after player — first to add to an Isak-led attack, and then after their star striker pushed for an exit — they’ve created a situation for themselves where the best-case scenario is that they tread whatever for four months … and then potentially do this whole thing again in January.

While all of these other clubs have lots of uncertainty around their investments up front, Newcastle are the only club where we can say: The summer has definitely made them worse.