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Hugo Ekitike’s ascent to footballing prominence can be summed up in two numbers: the €28.5m Paris Saint-Germain paid for him in 2023, then the €80m shelled out by Liverpool for his services in 2025. Money well spent? It seems so: the French forward is the joint-fifth highest goal scorer in the Premier League this season, and there's no doubt he's not going to be one of the stars of the World Cup this summer alongside Kylian Mbappé.
But Ekitike isn’t just on a tear on the pitch. Away from the turf, his wrist has been on an excellent run of form too, with a notable hat-trick of models late last year. In October, he rocked a Chopard Alpine Eagle, a cool, clean integrated steel sports watch. In November, he posted an unboxing pic on his Instagram of an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak – not just any old Royal Oak, but a skeleton dial tourbillon model in a striking deep green. The following month, we saw a classic Patek Philippe Aquanaut on an orange rubber strap. Three very respectable choices for a 23-year-old rapidly coming up in the game.
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Now for something a little more unexpected. At last week’s Balenciaga show in Paris, Ekitike wore another AP, but not the kind of chunky, complicated thing we expect from Premier League strikers. Instead, it was a vintage AP Cobra, from the '80s. This is a dinky 30mm dress watch, manual wind, with a bit of flash via the diamonds in the watch hands and hour markers. But the real draw is the case and integrated strap: yellow gold in a beaded mesh design that looks a little like snakeskin (hence the name).
The Liverpool squad is full of big watch guys. Star striker Mo Salah has an armoury of skeletonised, complicated pieces, including an AP Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar Openworked, and an electric blue Richard Mille RM17-02. Virgil van Dijk is another skeletonised Royal Oak guy; even manager Arne Slot has dabbled, with a subtler but no less stylish black-dial Rolex Datejust.
How to compete with all that? Ekitike has shown he can do high-performance luxury sports watches with the best of them. This Cobra, though, is in a different ballpark – it’s more capital-F Fashion-y; it fits neatly into the red-carpet trend for small, feminine dress watches on men. It’s the kind of thing, to be frank, we’d more expect to see on a stylish actor’s wrist than a footballer’s. But credit to Hugo Ekitike for swerving the footballer-watch-guy cliches and going for it. His wrist game is now showing as much promise as his attacking game.