Just How Good Really Is Gyökeres?

11 matches against the top six is a long enough sample to draw a conclusion, and Viktor Gyökeres has scored in one of them. The two goals at Tottenham on the 22nd of February are the entire return against Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea and Newcastle across the league season, and in most of the other nine fixtures he did not register a shot. The £55m signing Arsenal landed after summer interest from Manchester United, Juventus and Atlético has produced a goal every other game against the rest of the division.

The pitch in the summer was that the best goalscorer in Europe outside the top five leagues was finally going to walk into one of them and do the same thing, and the question, 14 Premier League goals into the experiment, is whether scoring against everyone else is enough.

Arsenal had no sporting director when this transfer window began. Edu Gaspar, who had run the recruitment department since 2019, resigned on the 4th of November 2024 to take a role at Nottingham Forest. The January window came and went with Jason Ayto leading the department on an interim basis, the failed £40m approach for Ollie Watkins logged on his watch. It was only on the 30th of March 2025 that Andrea Berta, almost 12 years at Atlético Madrid and the man who had built Diego Simeone's squads through two Champions League finals, walked into the Arsenal sporting director role. Arsenal had identified Gyökeres as one of two principal centre-forward targets alongside Benjamin Šeško, and Berta persuaded Mikel Arteta to prioritise the Swede on the grounds that the Slovenian's salary expectations and commission costs were too high for a player considered a development project.

Sporting's president Frederico Varandas had spent late June telling the Portuguese press that €70m was not the number, citing United's summer spending on Cunha (£62.5m) and Mbeumo (up to £71m) as the benchmark and considering both inferior to his striker. Arsenal's opening €55m bid was rejected outright. The deal closed at €63.5m plus €10m in add-ons, with Gyökeres going on strike for 13 days to force it through and accepting a €350,000 fine from Sporting. He signed a five-year contract at the Emirates on the 26th of July.

Manchester United had been offered him on multiple occasions, and Ruben Amorim's public response the previous spring was: if a player only wants to come to United to play in the Champions League, then he will not come. Manchester City had taken themselves out of the market in January when Erling Haaland signed his nine-and-a-half-year extension to 2034. The bidders' table emptied around the player, and at 27 Gyökeres walked into the No. 9 shirt Arsenal had been trying to fill since selling Eddie Nketiah for £30m in August 2024 and Gabriel Jesus rupturing his ACL on the 12th of January.

The Primeira Liga sat seventh in the global league rankings on the eve of the window, with both Sporting and Benfica positioned below Bournemouth, Brentford and Nottingham Forest. More than half of the non-penalty league goals Gyökeres scored in 2024-25 came against teams that finished in the bottom four of the division, on a season in which his total of 39 league goals included only two against the sides who finished second to fifth.

The aerial weakness was the second concern. Gyökeres did not score a single headed goal in the Primeira Liga across 2024-25. His former Sporting teammate Daniel Carriço had said as much directly the previous year: he can score in all the ways, the only thing I think he can improve is heading, when he is inside the box he is not the best quality. The third concern was the hold-up question. Gyökeres had been the central reference point in a Ruben Amorim system built around feeding him into channels and on the run, and the worry was that an Arsenal team that controlled possession and broke down low blocks would ask him to do something he had not been asked to do at Sporting.

David Eklund, the scout who discovered him at 15, put it bluntly: every team needs a player like Viktor, if he goes to Spain he'll score goals, if he goes to England he'll score goals. The scepticism and the endorsement were both on the record before the deal closed, and a year later both sides can point to the per-fixture record and claim they were right.

Five strikers have made meaningful debut Premier League seasons in the xG era. Costa and Haaland won the league; Núñez, Isak and Højlund finished outside the top three. Gyökeres has joined the conversation on raw output (14 goals, third in the group) and split the room on everything else.

His finishing profile is Costa-Haaland: elite conversion, the same big-chance success rate as Haaland in his debut. His volume is below the also-rans: less than half of Haaland's shots-per-90, lower than every striker in either group bar Højlund, whose 2023-24 Manchester United team produced a service line so thin he managed 10 in 30.

The finishing argument points one way and the service argument points the other. The Costa and Haaland half of the comparator split delivered both, 20-plus goals from a serial overperformer in a team that fed him relentlessly. Gyökeres has delivered the first half and not the second. Whether that is a problem with the player or a problem with the team is the question the home-away record answers next.

Gyökeres at home and Gyökeres away are not the same striker. Nine goals at the Emirates against five on the road, on half the shots, and 10 big chances missed at home against one away.

The reading of that split is not that he is missing chances on the road. It is that Arsenal are not generating them for him. A side that creates 10 clear sights of goal for its centre-forward across 18 home games and one across 17 away games is doing two different things in the same shirt depending on the venue. The home version of Arsenal feeds him the box service that the Costa and Haaland templates depended on, and he converts at a rate that puts him in their company. The away version asks him to manufacture his own output, and the volume collapses to a level that puts him below every comparator in the pool other than Højlund.

The home record looks elite until you strip the top six out of it. Against City, Liverpool and Chelsea at the Emirates, Gyökeres produced no goals between the three matches, one shot on target across them, and an expected-goals figure that rounded to zero in each. The home goals came against Leeds, Sunderland, Fulham, Forest, Everton and Bournemouth. The road and the top six are the same pattern, the same player suppressed by the same kind of opposition.

The most-quoted line on Gyökeres in the opening weeks of the season was the comparison to Rasmus Højlund. Frank Leboeuf called the signing useless on the Monday morning after Arsenal's defeat at Manchester United, on the grounds that Højlund had been bought into a team that did not play the way he played and so had Gyökeres. The debate that week was framed around exactly that question, whether the debut goal tally would land closer to Højlund's 16 across all competitions or Haaland's 52.

The comparison was unfair in the literal sense and useful in the structural sense. Højlund was 20 when Manchester United paid Atalanta an initial £64m in August 2023. Gyökeres was 27 when Arsenal paid Sporting the equivalent of £55m two summers later. One was a striker bought on potential, the other a striker bought on output. The trajectory the two debuts were always going to follow was different by definition, and the 14 Premier League goals Gyökeres has produced is already four ahead of the 10 Højlund managed across his debut season.

The harder question is whether beating Højlund is the standard. Arsenal did not spend £55m on a 27-year-old central striker so that he could outscore the most disappointing major-money striker debut of the last decade. They spent it on the player who had scored 97 goals in 102 Sporting appearances, including six in eight Champions League matches the season before he left, on the understanding that the conversion to a higher tier of football would cost something but not everything. His tally is more than Højlund's and less than every Costa-or-Haaland-tier debut in the comparator pool.

The criticism came earliest from the home support. By the second week of December Gyökeres had been through a six-game drought and had reached six goals in 18 Premier League appearances, and the question of whether Arsenal had bought the wrong striker was loud enough that Arteta used his pre-Wolves press conference on the 12th of December to defend the player: the sample is very small, he said, leave him alone, let him do what he does best, be behind him and I'm sure things will turn out in the right way. The Wolves match the following afternoon ended 2-1 in stoppage time.

The goals returned in stages. The seventh came in January, and then a hamstring problem in February took Gyökeres out for the back end of the month. Only Morgan Gibbs-White and Thiago have outscored him in the division since the turn of the year.

The form arrived alongside Martin Ødegaard's knee injury and Eberechi Eze's move into the No. 10 role, with the Bukayo Saka link from the right channel finding the rhythm it had been missing for months.

The Champions League semi-final second leg against Atlético Madrid on the 5th of May was the performance the season had been waiting for. Diego Simeone set up in a deep 4-4-2, the kind of low block Gyökeres had been accused all season of failing against, and Gyökeres held the entire defensive line on his own for 90 minutes. He took the hits, ran the channels until Atlético's centre-backs broke shape, and presented his face for every press trigger.

The pundit class did not arrive at a verdict on Gyökeres this season and the morning after the Atlético semi-final made that obvious. On the Tuesday night Alan Shearer called the centre-forward play exceptional and Paul Merson, four days earlier on the Fulham brace, had said it reminded him of Haaland. On the Wednesday morning Michael Owen gave the same player and the same fixture a different verdict: certainly not been a disappointment, certainly not set the place on fire, into the 20s in all competitions, solid for somebody like that. The closer was the line that travelled: Arsenal have been searching and searching, and none of them are the Haaland or Mbappé or Kane that everyone is looking for.

Wayne Rooney took the other side of the argument. What Gyökeres brought to the Arsenal team was that he occupied defenders, made them work, ran the channels, and the by-product was the space he created for Eze and Saka. If Arsenal went on to win the league and the Champions League, Rooney said, Gyökeres would be a major reason behind it, because that was where Arsenal had been short in the last few years.

Both readings are defensible on the data the season has produced. Owen is right that the goal tally is not the elite-tier number the comparator pool produced; Rooney is right that the comparator pool is not the only way to measure a centre-forward's contribution to a team that scores from everywhere. The title race has answered itself in Arsenal's favour after Manchester City's draw on the run-in. Budapest answers the rest.

Arsenal paid £55m for a striker who has outscored Núñez, Isak and Højlund in his debut season but not Costa or Haaland, and whose finishing rate sits in the Costa-Haaland band on half the shots. The audit's first answer is in: he was good enough to lead the line of the Premier League champions.

Mikel Arteta and Andrea Berta chose the proven 27-year-old over the 22-year-old at Leipzig because they wanted a striker who could be the difference now. The other answer comes in Budapest on the 30th of May, against the side Gyökeres watched lift this trophy last summer.