Gyokeres too old, too big, too striker-ish for Arsenal? The nonsense debunked

We’re detecting a bit of sniffiness from Arsenal fans about the idea of signing Viktor Gyokeres, which caught us off-guard because he is a striker who scores many goals and there is no more profound truism in English football at this time than the sure and certain knowledge that Arsenal Just Need Someone To Put The Ball In The Net.

Putting to one side our aversion to going down too many Arsenal social-media rabbitholes – last time we did that we found ourselves slack-jawed watching a man argue with apparent intense earnestness that Arsenal are a bigger club than Manchester United – we’ve pinpointed a few apparent grounds for these misgivings, which we will attempt to now debunk if we can.

His Age
The problem with Gyokeres here is he’s a lot closer to 27 than he is to 26. By the time Arsenal actually get their hands on him he will in fact be older than 27, because as we know the day after your 27th birthday, you are no longer 27. That’s just maths.

Timeless internet japery aside, this one puzzles us to the very edge of a despair spiral, frankly. Is 27 really so very old that signing such an ancient one is inherently a bad idea? For a club that signed a 26-year-old Dennis Bergkamp and a 27-year-old Ian Wright?

At a time when Robert Lewandowski (36) and Harry Kane (31) remain two of the most prolific strikers at the elite pointy end of the game, this dread fear over the long-term use of a 26/27-year-old feels a bit much.

Strikers Are Gauche
We’re being slightly (very) glib here, a little bit, but – choosing our words carefully – we do wonder whether certain sections of the Arsenal fanbase have backed themselves so thoroughly into an aesthetic corner that the very idea of a Big Man Up Top is antithetical to ‘The Arsenal’ and the way they like to think of themselves.

It’s been so long since Arsenal actually had a Proper Striker that they now consider the very idea something approaching ‘cheating’ or at least bad form.

And you really don’t want to end up as ‘The Harry Kane team’ you so dismissed where you have a 30-goal cheat-code and still don’t win anything, do you?

MEDIAWATCH: Rashford ‘swipe’, Gyokeres ‘agreement’ and a 13-goal striker for £100m-plus?

He Scores Penalties
If the previous one is slightly entangled with Arsenal fans’ Harry Kane conundrum over the years, then this one is impossibly and potentially insolubly so. We’re not really sure when ‘non-penalty goals’ became a vaguely acceptable piece of cheating to make players’ records instantly less good when that suited your argument, but we’re absolutely certain Alan Shearer never had to deal with that bollocks.

We’re also not really convinced that 32 career penalties is even that much for someone as unimaginably old as Gyokeres. It doesn’t seem that bad. Although over half of them have come this season, which – fair play – is an absolute sh*t-ton of penalties.

Our view remains as it ever was on this: penalties are goals, they count as goals, they should continue to count as goals. But we will grudgingly meet this bad-faith criticism halfway and accept that when looking at this season’s stats specifically, that is an outlier in terms of a total number of penalties and he may not get as many opportunities from the spot in subsequent seasons, or indeed even be the designated penalty-taker for a club who have Bukayo Saka anyway.

Still, though. ‘Striker scores penalties’ absolutely does not strike us as a deal-breaker.

Though obviously, all Harry Kane’s England penalties do not count. Or all the other ‘goals’.

He Is Not Alexander Isak
This might be the main one, to be honest. Gyokeres is absolutely the wrong Swedish striker, and it doesn’t matter that he might be available at a third of the price this summer compared to his compatriot, who may very well not be available at all even at those kind of eye-watering nine-figure sums.

There are some reasonable elements to this. We would probably concede that Isak is better than Gyokeres, he is powerfully Premier League-proven now and we can even see how he is sufficiently Henry-adjacent that even the most striker-averse Arsenal fans can get on board.

Isak comes with fewer risks. There is no adaptation time, no concern about his ability to do it in this league, and perhaps above all no grave concern that Arsenal might change everything else good about their football to accommodate his style of play.

But Arsenal do not have a divine right to an Alexander Isak. And if an Isak deal cannot be done and a Gyokeres one can, then the specific comparison becomes moot.

The Portuguese League Is A Farmers League
The Portuguese League is absolutely not as good as the Premier League. Don’t think anyone is getting singed by the sheer heat of that take, but there comes a point where the numbers are so overwhelming that a punt has to be taken by someone.

Scoring goals in Portugal might not guarantee goals in England, but sometimes people are guilty of mangling that into a guarantee he won’t score goals in England. A record of 59 goals in 59 games in the top flight of any half-decent European league, farmer or otherwise, can’t just be dismissed.

Chuck in six goals in eight Champions League games this season and there’s at least some evidence he can perform at a higher level. Although admittedly three of those goals did come against Man City.

Gotcha Fear
This isn’t an Arsenal thing. This is a wider part of online football fandom in which everyone lives in constant fear of being seen to be excited or enjoying themselves, which won’t do. Anyone getting excited about this thing that really is supposed to be fun at the end of the day now lives at constant risk of the after-timed social-media gotcha and nobody wants that.

It partly explains why, to use a high-profile example from this season, so many Liverpool fans were so huffily opposed to the idea that they were favourites to win the league long after it became clear they were favourites to win the league.

It’s bet-hedging, in essence. Say ‘Hmm, not convinced about Gyokeres tbh’ and you’re golden either way. Either you’re wrong, in which case he’s scoring loads of goals and all is right with the world or you’re right and you can at least wallow in that for a short time. Not for too long, though, or you return to the dreaded state of gotcha-risk. It’s a minefield, it really is.

The Deeney Paradox
We don’t know if Troy Deeney is an Arsenal fan and frankly we don’t want to know. It’s information we could do without. Statistical probability tells us he isn’t an Arsenal fan so he shouldn’t really go in here, but we couldn’t resist the absolutely shatterproof logic of his reasoning as to why Arsenal should avoid signing Gyokeres.

We’ll gloss straight over the assertion that the 59-goals-in-59-games man is ‘not a natural finisher’ because we’re all entitled to our opinions, aren’t we.

No, what we’re particularly fascinated by here is what Deeney said next.

“But I don’t think he takes either of those two [Arsenal or Manchester United] to winning the Premier League.

“That’s just my opinion, and if he did, they’d have already bought him.”

Again, Deeney is right to say that first statement is just his opinion and we will not rob him of it. But that last bit? That is magnificent. That is unanswerable. If he were good enough to win them the league, they would already have bought him. They haven’t already bought him, ergo he will not win them the league. The prosecution rests.

The fact this makes signing any player at any time ever a mistake – because if the player were worth signing you’d have already signed them previously – is neither here nor there.