How Viktor Gyokeres became Europe’s hottest striker

The numbers alone are frightening.

Viktor Gyokeres has made 25 appearances for club and country so far in 2024-25. He has scored 33 goals.

He was top scorer in the Portuguese top flight for Sporting CP last season with 29 goals (eight more than anyone else). He has already scored 16 in the league this season (again, eight more than anyone else) and only failed to score in six of those 25 games in all competitions.

He scored nine for Sweden in the recent Nations League group stages. He has scored 67 goals in 69 matches for Sporting since joining from Coventry City for a bargain £17million ($21.4m).

At the age of 26, he is coming into his prime and will be one of the most sought-after players in European football in the coming months.

Oh, and to prove he doesn’t just score in a weaker league than Europe’s top divisions, he scored a Champions League hat-trick against Manchester City the other week too.

Not bad for a player who was in English football’s second tier just 18 months ago.

What is behind Gyokeres’ rapid rise to prominence? And is this form temporary or permanent?

The Athletic spoke to key figures from Gyokeres’ three clubs prior to his move to Lisbon, to find out if his incredible goalscoring feats were inevitable…

Talking of striking numbers, no fewer than eight of the most recent Sweden squad either came through the academy at IF Brommapojkarna (translation: the Bromma boys) in Stockholm, or have played for the club at some point in their careers.

More commonly known as BP, they gave Gyokeres his first-team debut in 2015, aged just 16. That’s not an uncommon occurrence for a club which prides itself in promoting young players, including one of the other form players in Europe right now in Dejan Kulusevski, as well as his young team-mate at Tottenham Hotspur, Lucas Bergvall.

BP are fairly unique in their approach. Their first team flit between divisions and are currently in the top flight, finishing tenth out of 16 this season. Former Aston Villa defender Olof Mellberg will finish his second spell as manager when his contract expires on December 1, after which he will take over at MLS side St. Louis City FC.

But BP are a club known far more for the talent they produce rather than the trophies they win. They basically have more players than fans, with 4,000 spread over youth and grassroots levels (compared to an average home attendance of around 2,000).

The academy is well structured and well renowned, with a culture of youth development, as well as a football ideology which is possession-based and involves high pressing.

Gyokeres stood out from a very early age. Unsurprisingly, given the career he has gone on to have, it was for his ruthlessness in front of goal more than anything else.

“If he had the chance to score, it doesn’t matter if he broke his leg, he needs to score,” says Peter Kisfaludy, who now works at Swedish top-flight side Djurgarden and held a variety of roles at BP including academy director.

“Gyokeres wants to go directly to goal — he is powerful, he gives 100 per cent in the box. If you’re gonna kick the ball away, he can move his head to get the ball back. He is not afraid, he is totally ruthless.

“He grew a lot and didn’t have the technique for it initially. He has always been so physical. He could play senior football early because he was strong and fast.

“It’s his winning mentality. He went on loan to St Pauli in Germany and I remember when he was there we spoke on the phone and he said, ‘I’m so lonely but this is only going to make me much stronger’.

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“The good thing with Viktor is he can score in so many ways. He is a box player but he can also drive forward with the ball because he is fast and strong.”

It wasn’t a smooth road to the top for Gyokeres, far from it. Youthful petulance got in the way at times, as Andreas Engelmark, BP’s current academy director who has been at the club for many years, adds: “I had him in school sessions when he was 13.

“I remember I spoke to him one time and said, ‘If you want to become a professional player, you can’t do this’. He wasn’t behaving properly but it wasn’t anything really bad. He said, ‘I’m not going to be a professional player’.

“So I said, ‘OK, I’m not going to push you’. And of course, he wanted me to really, but this was his mentality when he was young. He could be a little bit grumpy.

“Then he came to the club permanently when he was 15 and he was pushing hard. Great kid, positive, working hard, big confidence and the physicality you can see now he had from an early age.

“The physicality, the directness to go to goal and be able to finish. The same things you see now. He scored a lot of goals.”

A return of 25 goals in 67 first-team appearances for BP is modest compared to the numbers he is putting up now at Sporting, but Gyokeres was a rough diamond who needed polishing. The potential, though, was evident.

His final act at BP? To score a hat-trick on the final day of the season as the club won promotion to the top flight.

Brighton barely make a mis-step when assessing the potential of young talent.

Like BP, they are a leading light in Europe in terms of taking raw, talented players and making them whole, albeit on a much bigger stage in the Premier League.

Moises Caicedo, Ben White, Yves Bissouma, Evan Ferguson, Alexis Mac Allister, etc, it’s an extensive list. And Gyokeres is on it in terms of being a player that Brighton spotted, signed and nurtured… but he left the club without making a league appearance.

It’s hard to believe, given their track record, that a few short years later a player Brighton let go is now one of the most desired in European football.

“Players develop at different rates,” the club’s long-serving chief executive Paul Barber tells The Athletic. “Sometimes pathways are unavoidably blocked, so a loan or permanent move is a better option, particularly if the player really wants to be settled sooner.”

Gyokeres was 19 when he moved to the English south coast in January 2018, initially playing for Brighton’s under-23 side before getting the odd appearance in domestic cup competitions.

He made his debut against Southampton in the EFL Cup in August that same year, played in the FA Cup a few times and scored against Portsmouth in the EFL Cup in 2020, in and around loan spells with St Pauli, Swansea and Coventry.

(Glyn Kirk/PA Images via Getty Images)

Those loan spells weren’t too fruitful in terms of goals (none in 11 appearances for Swansea in the Championship, mostly as a substitute), though, and with first-team opportunities limited at Brighton, the decision was taken to move him on.

Physically, Gyokeres was ready, but technically he still needed a bit of work. Graham Potter was head coach at the time and wanted a No 9 who could drop deeper and link play.

For the Under-21s, they had Aaron Connolly in the central striker role, while in the first-team Brighton had senior strikers Danny Welbeck and Neal Maupay blocking Gyokeres’ path and Ferguson was starting to come through, meaning Gyokeres played much of his time at Brighton out on the wing. It just didn’t work out.

“In 2021, when Viktor was transferred to Coventry, his pathway here wasn’t clear and, with his contract running down, he wanted a permanent home,” Barber explains. “We have to accept the decision to sell for what it was at that time – right for the player, and right for the club.

“What Viktor has gone on to do is fantastic. Everyone is delighted for him. He is a great lad and has become a fantastic player, good luck to him. Player recruitment isn’t an exact science, neither are decisions to move players on or when to do so.

“You can always look back on decisions using the benefit of hindsight but there will always be reasons for them. It’s about making a series of judgments in real time. Most clubs have similar examples. It’s football. It happens.”

Gyokeres, the one that got away.

Gyokeres never really got that chance at Brighton. But it seems it was because he got a chance at Coventry — an opportunity to be the main striker in a Championship side — that he flourished.

The Swede did alright for the Sky Blues during a loan spell in the second half of 2020-21, scoring three goals and showing a bit of potential in appearances mostly made from the bench.

But it was when Coventry signed him permanently for around £1million in the summer of 2021 that Gyokeres, aged 23, began to thrive with the responsibility handed to him by head coach Mark Robins and his assistant Adrian Viveash.

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Viveash remembers seeing a visible difference in Gyokeres that summer, before he went into the most prolific period of his career to that point with nine goals in the opening 11 Championship matches.

“He came back first day of pre-season and all the coaches, myself, Dennis Lawrence (first-team coach), we could see the difference in him,” Viveash told The Athletic FC podcast. “He just looked a different person. Bags of confidence, (it) had obviously been alluded to by the club that he was going to be the main man, he was going to play nine.

“He earned the faith that he got in him and he just started to terrorise Championship defences. And for two years, he just got better and better.

“He worked very hard. If you defend on the halfway line against someone like Vik, he is going to keep running in behind. He may miss one or two chances, but he’ll make the run 13, 14, 15 times. And for defenders, that’s very difficult to deal with. So the power and explosive pace came to the fore.”

Coventry spent time working on Gyokeres’ ability with his back to goal in tighter areas, as well as moving across defenders and finishing early. He responded with 38 goals in 91 league appearances at Coventry, earning a move to Sporting in 2023.

His unflinching, headstrong attitude has been a strength for Gyokeres to eventually succeed at senior level, but it has perhaps also led to him being a slightly late developer in terms of how he has taken to instruction from coaches.

“He was a really interesting character to work with because he was so driven,” Viveash adds. “Obviously, I’m a driven coach. I’ve been fortunate to work with some top, top players. He’d say; ‘Well, I’m better than them.’ So we had a good bit of banter while time was going on, but it was a very chatty coach-to-player relationship. The confidence has always been there.

“That run-in power is definitely geared to Premier League football, the back to goal and some of the other things.

“I’m sure he still has to keep developing because you’re playing against bigger and stronger centre-backs in Europe and in the Premier League.

“He’s a really nice lad, very humble and works extremely hard. It’s a lovely story to see somebody develop a little bit later and in a different way because everybody’s different.”

Like at Coventry, it is regular first-XI football at Sporting that Gyokeres needed to continue his progression.

Viveash, who says Gyokeres’ father Stefan plays a key role in guiding and shaping his son’s career moves, believes that whether Gyokeres can thrive in a division like the Premier League or not, he will get the best from his own ability. We may get another glimpse of that against Arsenal in the Champions League on Tuesday night.

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“It’s turned out to be an outstanding choice for him and also for Sporting,” he adds.

“He’s not a natural finisher for me. I’ve worked with several that are very natural, he’s not, so that’s great and credit to him for improving that area of his game and certainly hitting the numbers he’s hit.

“If he plays against William Saliba and that physical specimen of Gabriel, who are obviously as good as there is in world football at the moment, you would think then that will add either a positive or negative to the argument.

“He was one of those who deserved the opportunity – and if it (a Premier League move) comes in the future, he’ll certainly give it everything he’s got, that’s for sure.”

(Additional reporting: Andy Naylor)

(Bernardo Benjamim ATP Images/Getty Images)