No one on this Arsenal team drives debate and discussion like Viktor Gyökeres.
Here we are a bit over a year after his signing and there aren’t really Arsenal fans that still sit on the fence about him. The opinions are strong, entrenched, and pretty surprisingly mixed about him.
I know that I can personally get frustrated with watching him play and that will come out in some of the more impulsive or reactive moments but I come down somewhere in a more middle ground between the 'he's crap and unusable' camp and the 'he's great, Arteta's using him wrong' camp.
Looking back at what Adam and I have written about him before he signed with Arsenal, I think he has basically been exactly what we anticipated as the most likely outcome.
Here is what I said about him as it looked like were Arsenal locking in on him as the striker target last summer:
I can’t help but feel a bit mixed today on this news…
Gyokeres ends up as a bit of a weird middle ground. His age isn’t bad but he’s in the middle of his prime and there isn’t probably another level to go to here with him. He’s been great in his domestic league but only pretty good when he has come up against competition that is of the caliber of the Premier League.
If Arsenal wanted a win now option guys like Ollie Watkins or Victor Osimhen were there and probably guaranteed more floor while having similar or better upside…
It does seem that the price is going to be manageable but I am curious to see what sort of wages he will end up on because that will help shed some light on if this is a striker that they expect to be the number one guy (and I’d be nervous about that bet) or if he is more of a rotation option (more comfortable about that).
It is hard to read the future but I am coming from a starting point that this is not a player that I would be expecting to displace Kai Havertz from the starting position.
Here is what Adam wrote all the way back in 2024 when the links first started to heat up after doing a big film study on him:
Gyökeres is a bit of a tough evaluation. Is there a good player here? For sure. Does he offer something Arsenal don’t have in spades? I do think so. His dynamic and chaotic attacking style reminds me somewhat of Darwin Nunez (another player he’s older than).
But my bigger question is simple: what does Gyökeres enable Arsenal to do that they couldn’t do by signing a number 8 midfielder and making Kai Havertz a permanent striker? Not only do I think Havertz might be better (or at least more proven in the Premier League), the money’s already been spent on him, and get this - he’s a year younger than Gyökeres.
The film itself is pretty good, in my view. He’s scoring a ton and assisting quite a bit as well. Sporting are also one of the most talented clubs in their league, and they’re being coached well by a top young candidate for a bigger job.
With this player, I have difficulty shaking the disbelief that so much should have changed between Coventry and Sporting that only now is he worthy of a big English club. And not only that, but he’ll also go for a top-level price.
It is pretty fair to say that we came in with our expectations at a low level and had healthy skepticism about the ceiling of the player.
His first season and change from my perspective has vindicated our scouting and analysis of the player. He’s been a bit above average in the most frustrating ways a striker can be.
If you paid attention to his style of play before he signed you would have known to expect that he is not a high touch player. He had good assist numbers but that was more about his box touches than him dropping into the attacking midfield spots and playing like a midfielder.
So when I was thinking about him, I basically dropped everything outside of getting shots and scoring goals for what I wanted from him. I think that doing things outside of the box is important and helpful for a striker but I wanted to be realistic and keep things simple. If he added anything else to the team I would view it more as a cherry on top, rather than something that I expected as a selling point.
His transfer fee and wages paint a bit of a mixed view into where the club see him with regards to his standing in the team. His transfer fee puts him as the 10th most expensive forward that moved in 2025-26, with 7 players in the Premier League costing more than him. Wages are murky and unreliable but this points toward him being paid not quite starting striker on a top team money but much higher than a player that is a pure backup. Arsenal didn’t take a massive swing on him, but they have invested heavily in this player and they would have fairly high expectations for that investment.
In that vein, I tried to set my own personal expectations for him. Before the start of last season, I took his numbers in Portugal plus his numbers in the Europa and Champions Leagues and used that to set the level for what I would call a successful season for him. I discounted his Primeira Liga numbers by roughly 30% and added that to his production in Europe to arrive at the figures.
I set my baseline at 2.7 shots per 90 and 0.45 goals per 90, and then I tracked that every week posting a graphic like this showing his overall progress towards these measures.
His overall shot production took a larger fall than I had expected but he did compensate for that by increasing his average chance quality. He ended up missing on shots by 25% but was basically right at expectations for the goals scored finishing with 0.43 compared to my baseline of 0.45.
My expectations here would have put him in roughly the 70th percentile for strikers in both categories, not bad, but not the profile of a player carrying an attack.
He may not have carried the attack but he was still helpful. He scored 11 non-penalty goals, a total only six players have bettered in the entire Arteta era. Four of them broke a deadlock and another turned a one-goal lead into two. In a title race where the margins were thin, he made a real contribution. Underwhelming and useful are not mutually exclusive.
Let’s now put his production in context of what he did compared to his peers in the League. There were 18 strikers in the Premier League that played at least 1800 minutes and spent 60% of that playing striker. Here is where his main stats ranked:
2.15 total shots per 90 - 13th
1.68 open play shots per 90 - 11th
0.43 non-penalty xG per 90 - 8th
0.29 open play xG per 90 - 10th
0.86 shots on target per 90 - 11th
0.9 big chance shots per 90 - 8th
4.41 shot zone touches per 90 - 4th
5.63 box touches per 90 - 4th
16.29 passes received per 90 - 16th
0.86 crosses received per 90 - 12th
There isn’t really anything here where he is the worst striker in the League like some of the critics would classify him as but this is very lackluster and unexciting, especially considering that Arsenal were the best team in the league and somewhere between the 2nd and 4th best attacking team last year.
There is a bit of a narrative that Arsenal just need to play to his strengths more to allow him to really show what he is capable of. There is probably some truth to this and if Arsenal were able to generate games that had more back and forth transitions and space to attack that his numbers would look better.
To an extent Arsenal did exactly what was suggested by his backers. The team’s style changed quite a bit last season from what they had in the past; playing longer and more direct, they also played at a much quicker pace progressing up the field than they had before. Here is how Arsenal’s ball progression up the field evolved over the last few seasons:
23/24 attacking at 1.8 yards/sec
24/25 it was 1.9 yards/sec
25/26 that jumped to 2.3 yards/sec
Arsenal made choices to try and adapt their style towards something that would suit Gyökeres, including adding players that have been more successful leading transition play in Eberechi Eze and Martin Zubimendi in midfield.
Maybe there was even more that they could have done to move that direction but I would deny that they haven’t tried. This would lead to the question of would it even make sense to do it? We know that Gyökeres is/was a low-touch player, but even if the tactical style wasn’t perfect you would have a hard time making the claim that he was starved of touches in dangerous areas. He had the 4th most touches in shooting locations and touches in the box among Premier League strikers last season.
The problem seems to be that he just isn't talented enough to turn his opportunities into value at much more than an average rate.
The conclusion that these data points lead me towards is that he isn’t a player that is special enough to build everything around and design a tactical system that will maximize him at the expense of the collective or other attackers.
He made a major contribution to Arsenal winning the Premier League last season and reaching two other finals along the way. Even if the projected/hoped for ceiling when he was signed won’t be reached, he isn’t useless.
He can be a helpful player to have on the team and given that Arsenal will hope to play in 60+ matches again this coming season, it will be important that he can help soak up the minutes load while providing League average production. He is an Arsenal player, I am going to support him (but still analyze him fairly and not pull punches if needed) and hope that he can help the team achieve the goals of the season.
My goal here and going forward is to make this more or less my last word on the player for a while.
I will comment on him where his actions on the pitch warrant it when breaking down Arsenal after a match but this will become something that is more in line with his standing within the team as a rotation/backup option rather than a first eleven regular.
Thoughtful take
Was he worth the price compared to other alternatives do you think?