The words came from Jurgen Klopp’s mouth but it could have been Pep Guardiola speaking. “He’s a different striker to what we have or what we had, but he’s a really good one,” said the Liverpool manager. He was talking about Darwin Nunez, while Guardiola may spend much of Manchester City’s season discussing Erling Haaland.
Their flagship signings are the sorts of players they neither had nor, perhaps, needed. City and Liverpool scored a combined total of 297 goals last season. Very few came from actual strikers: with Gabriel Jesus rebranding himself as a right winger, arguably none of City’s 150 did. Maybe only Divock Origi, who was responsible for six of Liverpool’s 147, qualified as a conventional centre-forward at Anfield. Diogo Jota could excel in the middle in his own fashion, Sadio Mane proved a remarkable success as a No 9 and Roberto Firmino remains Anfield’s definitive false nine. But arguably none would have met traditional descriptions of a centre-forward.
Enter strapping six-footers who can be defined by their scoring statistics. “His numbers are remarkable,” said Guardiola of Haaland: 115 goals in 116 appearances for Borussia Dortmund and RB Salzburg, with better than one a game in the Champions League. A fundamental difference between striking additions is that Nunez has only reached that level of potency for one season, yielding 34 goals for Benfica last year.
