The damning stats which suggest that Arsenal still need to be worried about Viktor Gyökeresplaceholder image
The damning stats which suggest that Arsenal still need to be worried about Viktor Gyökeres | Getty Images
Should Arsenal be concerned about the form of Viktor Gyökeres? The stats suggest that they probably should.
Arsenal headed into the summer transfer market with one clear priority – to find a striker who would score the goals they needed to go from being the Premier League’s perennial bridesmaids to champions. They landed on Viktor Gyökeres.
The Swedish striker, bought for a reported £63.5m including add-ons, was their clear first choice after a prolific spell with Sporting in which he scored 79 goals in just 83 games. He seemed like a can’t-miss signing. Missing, however, has been precisely what he’s been doing for most of his first dozen games with the Gunners.
Gyökeres went nine games without a goal for club and country before bagging a brace against Atlético Madrid in the Champions League on Tuesday night. But was that the moment the dam burst, or a false dawn for a forward who’s struggling to cut it at the highest level? We analysed the stats to try and figure it out.
Mikel Arteta says Gyökeres makes Arsenal ‘a better team’ – but is he right?
Gyökeres’ Arsenal career started promisingly enough, with three goals in his first four matches – two against Leeds United and another against Nottingham Forest. After that, however, he went stale. Mikel Arteta, when questioned about his new signing after the Atlético Madrid match, was keen to highlight the good in his performances.
"He deserved [his goals],” Arteta said. “Because everything that we were seeing in terms of what he was bringing to the team and how much he was helping the team in many areas, apart from scoring goals in the last few weeks, there was no debate about that.
“He makes us a much better team. I think we've become much more unpredictable. He's so physical, opens the spaces for everyone. The way he presses the ball, holds the ball, it's just phenomenal.”
There’s little doubt that his work off the ball has been impressive, but Arsenal wanted to move away from using Gabriel Jesus and Kai Havertz up front because while their movement and use of space was excellent, they simply didn’t produce consistently enough. Gyökeres needs to do more than create space.
In any case, he hasn’t been all that effective with the space he has made up front. At Sporting, he was a creator as well as a destroyer, producing 20 assists across his two seasons there. He has yet to set a goal up in Arsenal colours, and has gone from producing an average of 4.75 shooting chances per 90 minutes last season, to just 1.80 since moving to England.
Arsenal, of course, didn’t really buy Gyökeres for his creative qualities. They have plenty of players who can unlock defences and what they required was a goalscorer who can put those chances they generated away. That, in part, is likely why Arteta has used the striker in a narrower, more central role than he is perhaps used to. At Sporting, he hit the channels down the edge of the area far more, while at Arsenal he’s asked to stick closer to the middle and play as a more traditional number nine. They want him to be in the box when the ball comes in, and he will only truly make Arsenal a better team if he scores goals, often.
That means that he will ultimately be judged not on his work off the ball but the number of times he gets it into the back of the net. In the 2024/25 season he was averaging 3.93 shots per match and 1.19 goals off an average xG of 0.93. He was producing in quite incredible volume and finishing with lethal precision. That hasn’t been the case at Arsenal, at least as yet.
The stats which suggest that Arsenal have reason to be worried
Since moving to the Emirates, Gyökeres’ numbers in front of goal have been considerably worse. Adding his two Champions League goals into the equation, he has scored at a rate of 0.49 per 90 minutes – an extremely respectable rate – but from 0.52xG while getting 2.75 shots away per match.
Those numbers were always likely to fall away to some degree after moving from the relatively modest Portuguese Primeira Liga to the Premier League, but that’s a sharp drop-off and it’s a concern that he’s gone from comfortably exceeding his expected goals to under-performing them. He has, ultimately, been playing at the level of a decent Premier League striker, one who might score around 15 goals per season when surrounded by so much creative talent. Arsenal need more.
It's possible that his nine-match barren run was a product of a lack of confidence and early difficulties with adapting to a new team and tactical system, and that’s what Arsenal must hope. Raw statistics can’t account for self-belief or the learning curve. But the numbers we do have should have Arteta at least a little worried.
Perhaps Gyökeres’ goals against Atlético Madrid will mark a turning point, but neither could be described as the composed finishes of a world-class striker finding his groove – his first was massively deflected off a defender after he struggled to get the ball out from under his feet, and his second the easiest of tap-ins from barely a yard out. There’s nothing wrong with a striker getting a stroke of luck or putting away the easiest of opportunities, of course, but neither should those goals be seen as offering particularly compelling evidence of improvement.
It is unlikely that Gyökeres will be an outright failure. There is evident quality, just a question of whether it is present in sufficient abundance to be Arsenal’s answer to Erling Haaland, their talisman up top that leads them to league titles. He is on track for a respectable haul of goals, but Arsenal didn’t spend over £60m for a striker who scores at the same sort of rate as Jesus and Havertz. They wanted 30 goals a year, or close to it.
Gyökeres is not living up to that as yet. It may be that he just needs some time to get his feet under the desk and find his form, and that he eventually proves to be just as dangerous in the Premier League as he was in Portugal. Or, perhaps, he is a flat-track bully who lacks the standout technical qualities required to truly thrive at the very highest level.
The stats can only tell us so much – that right now, he isn’t reaching the required standard, that he isn’t scoring or creating chances often enough, that he isn’t playing at a level that sets him apart from the average forward in the league. They can’t tell us what he will do in a week, a month, or a year. For the sake of Arsenal’s chances of ending a wait of over 20 years to crowned champions of England, he had better turn those stats around at speed.
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