Just watched Match of the Day, and have seen the travails of Hojlund. On twitter there were the usual “he just needs one to go in and he’ll be away” sort of posts.
But it got me thinking, what examples are there of players that struggled at first, but went on to be really important and effective strikers? Obviously, youth team players that came through the ranks don’t count. Really just big signings at big clubs.
Højlund is already scoring at 1 in 3. Not world beater rate but not sure it counts as a struggle.
Gonzalo Higuain only scored 11 in his first 2 seasons at Real, but of course there’s a significant mitigating factor wearing the number 7 shirt scoring all the goals for them.
Sergio Agüero meanwhile only scored 7 goals in all competitions in his first season at Atlético before exploding the next year and not relenting until he left Citt
He’s got 5 in the champions league which is skewing his stats.
Hojlund is currently the top champions league scorer at 5 goals. The problem is that the team is shit and just cannot create enough.
Higuain was youngster first two seasons. He was 18 or 19 when he came to Madrid, and Ronaldo didn’t even play there at the time.
He was a regular starter those 18 months, he’d only played about 10 fewer games when joining Real than Højlund had when joining Man Utd. €12million was a decent chunk of change too - he wasn’t a “youngster” he was signed for the first team and almost immediately started playing for them, replacing original Ronaldo
Tbf Higuain was more of a winger or shadow striker than an actual one at the time. He was also 20.
Also iirc Van Nisterloy was scoring more than Raul at the time.
Scoring fewer than RVN is not exactly damning, the guy was a goal machine
Yeah obviously, it was just my answer to
But the guy clarified that he got confused and thought Ronaldo was playing then, while I thought he meant Raul was scoring all the goals, which wasn’t the case.