Elite Ekitiké Infinitely Better 'Footballer' than Haaland, On A Par With Isak

Lean, fast, skilful, hard-worker, versatile, good finisher, and the 'Iron Rod'

Note: I published a version of this article last week on my separate ZenDen Substack, where I write extra pieces for a small additional charge, but with no commenting.

To me, Liverpool want a footballing no.9 who can do it all, and who will get goals but maybe not the most goals. The aim is always for the team to succeed, and sharing both goals and creativity around is maybe the best way to go.

In April, I said that Huge Ekitiké was my ideal choice, from which I’ve only wavered on the basis of Alexander Isak, who seemed an impossible player to get back then, has since entered the equation, once ‘Newcastle’ started saying “he’s not for sale, and we’d have to start at £150m if he was”, from which other stuff has followed; only much more recently have I started to think the Reds could possibly get both.

To My Eyes, Hugo Ekitiké Suits Liverpool Perfectly

I recently looked at the 100 or so available metrics from FBref for the past year of football, over 60 of which, when you filter out the noise (number of throw-ins taken, etc), are about being good on the ball (passing, dribbling, creating, etc.). On those metrics, Hugo Ekitiké is huge, and Erling Haaland – the best-paid striker in the league, playing in the team with the most possession – is almost invisible.

While you can zoom in look at each attribute, some of which are more important than others, the aim with these radars in this form is to show the similarity between Isak and Ekitiké, and the big difference to someone like Haaland, that you wouldn’t get on a clearer but more limited 8-10-metric radar. You can see both the volume of the radar filled, and also the areas where it’s stronger or weaker.

So, in the choice between two amazing all-round strikers, Liverpool appear to have gone for French sensation Hugo Ekitiké, for £69m plus up to £10m in add-ons.

However…

Weird!

That said, it’s been a weird weekend since I wrote this piece, as I now set about updating what I wrote.

The more I look at Ekitiké, the more he makes sense as a Luis Díaz replacement who can play on the left (or as a no.9, false nine, no.10), and the more it seems like something is going on with Alexander Isak, as I wrote yesterday in the piece linked below:

Liverpool Can Afford Both Ekitiké AND Isak, AND Have Both in the XI

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So I half think Isak is still a potential goer, as I’ve said all summer.

But Newcastle are a complicated club these days, stuck between the limitless wealth of a nation state and PSR rules (which haven’t stopped them surpassing clubs who were better than them for years, until the Saudis arrived in 2021 and they suddenly got good again), and between the projection of power as not a selling club, and the reality of the possible necessity of selling-to-buy to overhaul an ageing, limited squad, with the manager currently in charge of transfers and their owners maybe having different ideas; as player after player rejects them, or Newcastle fail to meet the asking price.

A biggish club historically with a passionate fanbase, who finally won a trophy, but are geographically and culturally peripheral as far as many players are concerned. (I was due to move to the vague region various times in the past year but each time it fell through. But I’m not a rich footballer from somewhere a bit warmer, and I was looking for somewhere smaller, cheaper and quieter to live.)

For now, I won’t mention Isak too much, as Ekitiké is the reality, and Isak as well is the dream.

Ekitiké was labelled as a poor finisher because of last season (and last season alone), but career-wise, he’s a pretty good finisher even with last season included. These are the career averages since 2017 when the xG data first appears, of over 100 top strikers/attackers, for efficiency of scoring against the xG, and by shot volume (the shaded zone is for elite finishers).

(I didn’t mark out Isak, as he wasn’t in the conversation at the point I created this over a month ago, but he’s also fairly central on the graph, from memory. Like Ekitiké, he’s just a great all-rounder, rather than a pure finisher. His numbers are good, bar one bad season aged 21.)

I’ll go into more detail later, but you can see that the more shots a player takes, the worse their performance against the xG. (If you include European games for the all the best players, Florian Wirtz moves to the best finisher per shot.)

For Ekitiké to have had a massive 115 shots last season is slightly crazy, as he scored 10 for Reims aged 19 from just 29 shots.

I also then looked at the c.700 player seasons I used in the above study once all the players who had fewer than 10 shots in a season were removed (as they only played two or three games), and Ekitiké’s Reims breakthrough was the 4th-best of the 700 or so (more on that later).

His season last year was the 89th worst, but many of the games’ biggest strikers have had worst conversion seasons; which as I’ve shown all summer, is incredibly streaky from season to season. It seems like Ekitiké was told to shoot a lot last season, and that didn’t help his ‘data’, but overall, may have helped Frankfurt.

So, Ekitiké is a good finisher, as long as he’s not just shooting randomly, which is what I think he was doing in 2024/25, for the law of diminishing returns.

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With the other metrics split between shooting/finishing and defensive work, Ekitiké puts in a shift for his team, while Haaland doesn’t really shift at all.

In the box, Haaland is special, but it seems that it’s all he does, and last season he didn’t even do that so well. He does at least now do some defensive work, unlike in the past, and unlike the formidable but lazy Kylian Mbappé, whose presence seems to see him score goals but the system fail.

In all my data comparisons, the one player who Ekitiké most resembles is Alexander Isak, whose finishing is better – but who at a similar age to Isak had a terrible season for finishing in Spain.

But with Liverpool basically telling Mo Salah not to be lazy but to conserve energy at 33, the one big bonus with Ekitiké over Isak is work-rate and defensive contributions.

Otherwise, Ekitiké looks as creative and talented as Isak, but just doesn’t finish as well (yet). But again, nor did Isak at this age.

Also, to compare signing Ekitiké to the Reds’ signing Darwin Núñez in 2022 – as similarly unproven, and costing a similar fee – is missing the point completely as to why Núñez failed.

A Jürgen Klopp pick based in part on how well Núñez did on the break against Liverpool in 2021/22, he arrived as a fast, erratic player with poor game intelligence, but produced some chaos.

He didn’t suit the team at all, except when producing that chaos. His first touch remains poor, and he cannot beat a man; but he’s energetic. His finishing was in some ways the least of his problems, as he struggled to take part in subtle interplay, or stay onside, and couldn’t hold it up enough.

(Having said that, I have wondered all summer if Florian Wirtz’s through-ball and general creative magic would help Núñez, and I’ve said for three years that a haircut definitely would. He looks a bit beefier this summer, and looks sharp, albeit he’s had great preseasons before. Núñez is never going to be smooth or clever, but he could still be a handful. I still expect him to leave if a big enough bid comes in, but if he’s also learnt to shut out social media nonsense, which is partly why I felt he needed a haircut in 2022 – don’t make yourself a target – then that will help him too.)

Ekitiké is just an infinitely better ‘footballer’. He has the touch of a proper footballer, the skills of an elite winger, and clearly has game intelligence too.

While he’s lean, the fact that Lionel Messi called him The Iron Rod shows that he’s strong too, and with such fast feet and acceleration, he is like the equally lean Isak in that sense, but perhaps a bit more physically aggressive than the Swede (who has had no issues being lightweight as he’s just so clever).

I’ve touted Ekitiké for a while, as he’s so exciting, and can do a bit of everything, and had a year at PSG where he would have seen what not to do, as the lazy superstars were chosen ahead of him; and where he had to overcome adversity to get his career back on track. He is the anti-Núñez or Haaland as a striker, as he’s a complete player; like Isak.

Of course, it’s only really since I wrote the bulk of this piece that I’ve seen how good Ekitiké can be on the left wing, and if this is purely as a Díaz replacement, then with the additional tragic loss of Saint Diogo (who could play as a no.9 or from the left), and other players to depart, it could be that Ekitiké shares the left wing with Cody Gakpo and doubles up as understudy for a no.9 (who could be Isak).

Not least as, from the weekend as the first sign, it looks like the sublime Florian Wirtz will play behind a front three, and not from the left (even if he too can play about four different positions). Young Rio Ngumoha is looking good on the left in preseason, but at 16, he’s not physically ready for the Premier League beyond cameos.

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Look at the radars (below) from the last 12 months of football, and how much more Ekitiké does than Haaland, who is on £525,000 per week, which will be around 3x what the younger Frenchman will get at Anfield.

Given the large number of metrics, another way to present them is in descending clockwise order, in terms of percentiles. So the metrics will be in a different order, but you can get a sense of the chasm of involvement and skills.

If you want to bring Núñez into it, as the one true no.9 left at the club and due to be replaced (albeit looking sharp and hungry with the haircut in preseason), then again, the gulf is huge, in terms of all-round game:

Not Just Goals

People still talk about strikers and goals, and the more random assist metric (it’s not your fault if your teammates keep missing when you set them up).

Goals are important for a striker, but give me a team that shares around the shots and the goals; shares around the creativity and the defending. That’s a team.

Liverpool’s two league wins in recent times were like Chelsea’s first two of the Premier League era: not many goals from the no.9s, but a team weighing in from everywhere. Yet people fixate on having prolific no.9s who get 40 or 50 goals.

A top striker now is almost like a master of all trades.

At no point do you want play to break down with your no.9 because he cannot control the ball, cannot stay onside, cannot pass the ball, cannot progress the ball, cannot beat a man in tight spaces, cannot head the ball, cannot break up the pitch with the ball, cannot press to win the ball, and so on.

It feels like Ekitiké and Isak, as players, are more from the Thierry Henry mould of the ‘great footballer’ who happens to play up front; players with the skills of the winger built in, only not 5’7” but well over 6ft tall. Indeed, Henry started out as a winger, or at least had a spell there.

Henry himself had scored just 31 goals in all competitions as a player up to the age of 22, from 161 games, as well as just three goals for France by that age.

I saw Henry play for Arsenal at Anfield in one of his first games for the Gunners in August 1999 (when I still had my season ticket), and the Reds won 2-0. Dennis Bergkamp also started, and Davor Suker, the more proven goalscorer, came on for Marc Overmars. Robbie Fowler was the star that day, and injuries stopped him maintaining his magnificence beyond 2001.

I don’t think anyone would have expected Henry, with no great record of goals and starting slowly at Arsenal, to then blossom into possibly the best all-round striker in the Premier League era (and score more freely than Fowler), albeit Mo Salah has started to run him close.

We don’t have the xG conversion rates for back then, but I also noted how Alan Shearer didn’t score many goals until moving to Blackburn at the same age. Fernando Torres went stellar at 23. As such, I’ve long seen 23 as the age where a lot of strikers kick into gear as finishers, albeit now you can also see late-20s guys suddenly getting goals too (as I’ve covered at length before).

Ekitiké Can Finish

As I’ve said, it’s vital people don’t judge performance against the xG for strikers in a single season, as the variation is insane.

This summer, when I looked at over 100 strikers/attackers with data since 2017 (via FBRef, sample size of 15,000 games and 45,000 shots), and only Florian Wirtz never had a negative season in league or Europe … if you remove his first season in Europe which did not amount to a full game (so, set the game minimum to one).

Robert Lewandowski and Karim Benzema had the two worst seasons in overall terms.

• Lewandowski, 2018-2019, Bayern Munich -8.5

• Benzema, 2017-2018, Real Madrid -8.2

Ekitiké’s league xG conversion of -5.3 from last season looks fairly bad (15 league goals when 20 or so were ‘expected’), but it was -0.046 per shot, which is far from the worst. And it wasn’t -8.5 or -8.2 overall.

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