'Gyokeres 2.0' HUMILIATES Arteta after €9m Arsenal deal

Tom Weber

• Updated: 15 Feb 2025 21:14 GMT
• 4 min read

Arsenal's decision to sell Mika Biereth last summer is looking more foolish by the game.

The Gunners are crying out for a proper striker after season-ending injuries to Gabriel Jesus and Kai Havertz, while wingers Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli are also recovering from long-term issues.

Against Leicester on Saturday, Leandro Trossard had to start in the No.9 position before midfielder Mikel Merino came on as an attacking reinforcement to spare Arsenal's blushes with a vitally important brace.

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After the game, Arteta claimed that the Spaniard has something of a striker's gene. "Mikel has got that," the manager said. "It's a good threat because he can smell danger.

"He can anticipate the action. He's got really good timing to arrive to certain areas. And then, obviously, he has the capacity to execute with a lot of parts of his body."

Arteta sold his No.9 solution

Of course, Arteta only has to resort to these creative experiments because he has been left without a proper striker due to the aforementioned injuries. One can't, however, also understate what a massive role Arsenal's transfer business has played in all of this.

Arsenal did not sign a striker in the summer and again refused to dip into the market in January. While you can understand the reasoning - they did not want to waste their 2025 budget on a lesser option - you can't ignore the fact that they actually sold two No.9s last year.

Eddie Nketiah left the club to join Crystal Palace in a deal worth almost €30 million. It was a good piece of business by Arsenal. The homegrown represented a significant amount of pure profit and had no real future at the club.

However, the same can't be said of Mika Biereth. The London-born Denmark international had impressed on loan at Motherwell and then Sturm Graz and ultimately joined the latter permanently after never receiving a chance to show off his talents at Arsenal.

The 22-year-old initially moved to Austria for just €4.7m. Bonus payments and a sell-on percentage have since increased that figure to around €9m as Biereth joined Monaco in January for €13m.

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That is not an amount of money that will have had much of a bearing on Arsenal's ability to make signings, so allowing Biereth to move was not really a necessity - and it has since proved to be a foolish decision.

Biereth has developed into a machine. In five Ligue 1 games, he has netted two hattricks and was aptly nicknamed by Monaco's social media accounts as 'our Gunner' for his three-goal haul against Nantes in a 7-1 win on Saturday.

L'Equipe gave him a very good rating of eight out of 10 for his performance. "The Dane is extremely efficient," the French outlet wrote. "He scored his second hattrick of the season, two weeks after the one he scored against Auxerre.

"He is the centre-forward that Monaco was missing, an outstanding finisher with a real eye for goal. Skilful on the equaliser, clinical on the fourth goal by beating [Anthony] Lopes and calm on the penalty. He has already scored seven goals in five Ligue 1 matches."

To be sure, Ligue 1 and the Austrian Bundesliga are a different level of competition compared to the Premier League, but people at Arsenal knew how good Biereth could eventually become.

The Gunners' former loan chief Ben Knapper, now sporting director at Norwich, has described him as a player akin to none other than Viktor Gyokeres.

“Viktor also played in England, in the Championship, at Coventry City, and it was complicated for him before he became the player he is today at Sporting. Both have a very aggressive, very mobile style of play and they seem to have the same state of mind," he told L'Equipe.

Arteta and former recruitment boss Edu evidently did not rate Biereth as highly as Knapper. They will know have to live with the consequences. Arsenal's strikerless experiment worked against Leicester, but will it continue to bear fruit against better teams?