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Why did Arsenal let one of Europe’s most in-form strikers leave for just £4m last summer?
Arsenal will spend much of this summer searching frantically for a new striker – and will do so knowing that they contrived to let one of the fastest-scoring forwards in all of Europe slip through their fingers just last year.
Last summer, the Gunners sold Mika Biereth to Austrian outfit Sturm Graz for a reported £4m. He left the Emirates without having played a single match. Now, a year on, Sturm Graz have sold the newly-minted Denmark international to AS Monaco and Biereth simply cannot stop scoring.
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The sudden rise of Mika Biereth
In Arsenal’s defence, they aren’t the only Premier League team to have overlooked Biereth on his ascent towards the top of the game. The 22-year-old spent four years on Fulham’s books, only to be passed over in favour of developing Jay Stansfield, now at Birmingham City – but given how desperate Arsenal are for a goalscorer, Biereth’s feats with Monaco may be making them feel a little sick.
Following promising loan spells in the Netherlands and Scotland, Biereth moved to Graz on an initial loan deal and quickly started scoring more and more. Since signing permanently there last summer, he bagged 14 goals in 25 matches, enough to persuade Monaco to shell out around three times what Sturm Graz had paid for the striker in January.
The French side needed someone to cover for another talented striker who was deemed surplus to requirements at Arsenal – Folarin Balogun – but probably didn’t expect the move to work out as well as it has. Nine matches into his Ligue 1 career, Biereth has already scored 11 goals, with hat-tricks against Auxerre, Nantes and Stade Reims. Only PSG’s Ousmane Dembélé has scored more in a major European league since Biereth’s transfer.
That’s only three fewer goals in the league than Arsenal have scored as a whole since the move. With Gabriel Jesus and Kai Havertz out for the rest of the season (not that either has ever been a reliable source of goals), Arsenal have lacked any kind of cutting edge up front and are watching a player they discarded outscore almost everyone else on the continent.
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Biereth once joking referred to his playing style as that of “a s**t [Erling] Haaland and a s**t [Harry] Kane - a hybrid of them at a much worse level”, but is now outdoing both, at least over the last two or three months. And now Biereth, who was also qualified for England, Germany and Bosnia & Herzegovina, is a full international having made his debut for Denmark on Thursday night.
Why Arsenal let Biereth go
Biereth started in the number nine role against Portugal in the Nations League, and came close to scoring twice, seeing one shot blocked after a darting run just three minutes in and then forcing Diogo Costa into one of several fine saves that the goalkeeper made during an eventual 1-0 defeat in Copenhagen.
In failing to hit the back of the net, Biereth had a rare dry day, not that his energy and movement up front weren’t in evidence. He may see himself as a subpar version of Kane and Haaland, but a more apt comparison might be Jamie Vardy – he uses his pace to create an aggressive, dynamic playing style which puts him in a string of good scoring positions and sees him spend a lot of time lurking on the shoulder of the last defender.
In Arsenal’s defence, few would describe Biereth as a first-rate technician, and his passing, interplay and quality of touch isn’t of the standard Mikel Arteta typically prizes. Biereth is more old-fashioned sort of striker, one who simply scores goals. Unfortunately for Arsenal, they could rather do with that skill set right now, even if it doesn’t tick the sort of boxes Arteta wants to see ticked.
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Biereth is also something of a late bloomer, who didn’t start scoring with such remarkable frequency until it was too late for Arsenal to know what they had – neither the two Eredivise goals he scored for RKC Waalwijk nor the half-dozen he hit for Motherwell in the first half of the 2023/24 season hinted at what was to come.
But while he has progressed at a frightening and frankly unexpected pace, there may still be a lesson for Arsenal in their decision to let Biereth go – while it’s all very well building a squad around players with a refined first touch and the capacity to play incisive quick passes, you need someone to score the chances all that sharp passing creates.
In Biereth, Arsenal had precisely the kind of predatory striker that they needed to elevate their team and make a serious challenge for the Premier League. Instead, they let him go and left themselves short of depth and quality up front. Perhaps, this summer, they’ll ask their scouts to find them a slightly different sort of striker.