1 month ago
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Analysis
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If there’s one position that has dominated this summer’s transfer window both in terms of media attention and cold, hard cash transactioning from one club bank account to the other, it’s striker. No less than five of the top 20 biggest deals that have already been completed this summer were for players that play as either centre forwards or second strikers, with a total of just under €367 million spent on Hugo Ekitiké, Matheus Cunha, Mateo Retegui, Viktor Gyökeres and João Pedro alone in the last few months.
And they’re unlikely to be the last big summer moves for goalscorers. Multiple reports in England suggest that Newcastle’s Alexander Isak could be on his way to Liverpool for a record transfer fee for a Premier League club, while Benjamin Sesko continues to elicit interest from England’s richest club. It seems as though just about every big club in the sport has their eye on a new No.9 this summer. So is the sport currently going through a trend of prioritising strikers in the transfer market? Let’s find out.
How much money has been spent on strikers this summer?
According to Transfermarkt information, clubs around the world have spent no less than €1.06 billion on signing players that either play as a centre forward or a second striker. When we compare that to every summer transfer window in the past 10 seasons, it ranks bottom but that’s obviously because we’re still halfway through this current window. Curiously, when we compare that to last season’s summer transfer window - which was the second highest in the last two seasons - it comes in a little lower than the total sum paid in that period, which was an impressive €1.87bn. However, as we can note in the graphic above, last summer saw 496 strikers move clubs over the course of the transfer window. So far this summer - with an entire month left of the window - there have been 261 strikers that have moved clubs.
Of course, this summer’s figure could change very quickly. If Isak and Sesko do move clubs in the coming weeks for a combined fee of between €200-300m, it would put this summer’s figure as roughly the sixth highest among the last 10 summer windows. However, if this window is to see as many strikers move clubs as the average over the last 10 seasons - which works out at around 369 completed transfers - then it would suggest that 106 more centre forwards and second strikers are set to move clubs before the end of August and add to the total, over and above what Isak and Sesko may end up going for.
Are clubs paying more for strikers than ever before?
Perhaps a better way to look at this summer’s spending and to figure out whether there is a greater importance on goalscorers is to look at the average fee paid for a striker. So far this summer, €1.06bn spent on 261 transfers means that the average transfer fee for a striker stands at €4.06m per player. As we can see in the graphic above, that average is an 8% rise on last summer’s average of €3.78m per striker. However, it still comes below the busier summers of 2023, 2019 and 2020 - when the average fee paid for a striker stood at an impressive €4.61m.
These relatively small averages may not seem like a lot of money, but it’s worth bearing in mind that every €0.01m added to the average works out at around an extra €37m spent across the entire transfer market on strikers. So the €0.54m difference between this summer’s average and the average in 2020 is quite significant. However, as previously noted, that could quickly change in the coming weeks, if the likes of Isak and Sesko begin breaking transfer records. But for now, it seems as though this summer’s fascination with strikers is in keeping with the sports spending behaviour in previous years.
