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Three years ago, Liverpool paid an initial £64 million ($86m) for Darwin Nunez, a young striker with just one prolific season under his belt. The gamble did not pay off. On the contrary, it backfired badly, with the Uruguayan now regarded as one of the most disappointing deals in the club’s history.
It’s fascinating, then, that Liverpool have now committed even more money to signing another forward with a less impressive CV than that of Nunez back in 2022.
So, why were the Reds willing to stump up an initial £69m ($92.7m) for Hugo Ekitike? And what chance does he have of succeeding where Nunez failed so spectacularly? بالجم explores one of the biggest and most intriguing transfers of the summer so far…
Three years ago, Liverpool paid an initial £64 million ($86m) for Darwin Nunez, a young striker with just one prolific season under his belt. The gamble did not pay off. On the contrary, it backfired badly, with the Uruguayan now regarded as one of the most disappointing deals in the club’s history.
It’s fascinating, then, that Liverpool have now committed even more money to signing another forward with a less impressive CV than that of Nunez back in 2022.
So, why were the Reds willing to stump up an initial £69m ($92.7m) for Hugo Ekitike? And what chance does he have of succeeding where Nunez failed so spectacularly? بالجم explores one of the biggest and most intriguing transfers of the summer so far…
Liverpool began their search for a new No.9 long before the end of the 2021-22 season. As far as the Reds’ recruitment team was concerned, there were three outstanding young strikers in Europe at the time – Nunez, Alexander Isak and Erling Haaland – and that view would have been shared by scouts all across the continent.
As Liverpool’s former director of research Ian Graham recently revealed, Haaland was out of their price range, meaning they were left with a straight choice between Isak or Nunez. Then-manager Jurgen Klopp favoured the latter, so the Reds signed the Uruguayan. It proved a disastrous decision.
While Isak established himself as one of the most feared forwards in the الدوري الإنجليزي الممتاز after joining Newcastle from Real Sociedad in August 2022, Nunez became a laughing stock, a maddeningly frustrating forward mercilessly mocked for his atrocious finishing.
Liverpool’s desire to sell him this summer has, thus, come as no surprise. He has had numerous chances to prove his worth at Anfield and, rather fittingly, failed to take any of them.
Nonetheless, It would be unfair to be overly harsh on Klopp for buying Nunez. The striker really did look like a potential star at Benfica. He was big, strong, quick and had scored 34 goals in 41 appearances in all competitions during the 2021-22 campaign.
What’s more, six of those goals had come in the Champions League, including one apiece in both legs of Benfica’s quarter-final tie with Liverpool. With his direct, all-action style and mix of pace and power, Nunez had tormented the likes of Andy Robertson and Ibrahima Konate, who were only too happy to see him go from opponent to team-mate just a few months later.
Of course, excitement soon gave way to bewilderment, as it became painfully clear that Nunez simply couldn’t be relied upon to stay onside – let alone score goals. In that sense, Liverpool are lucky that they’re likely to make back quite a bit of the money they wasted on Nunez, even if Napoli’s withdrawal from the race to sign him is an undeniable blow.
However, Liverpool’s hopes of righting a wrong by belatedly bringing Isak to Anfield appear to be over, with Newcastle having understandably deemed it better to let the Reds have Ekitike rather than Isak. That development has disappointed plenty of supporters, who were salivating at the prospect of seeing the Swedish striker in the same side as Mohamed Salah and Florian Wirtz.
After all, Isak is, unlike Ekitike, Premier League-proven. His quality simply cannot be questioned after netting 44 times in his last 64 outings in England’s top-flight. Ekitike, by contrast, remains something of an unknown quality in the eyes of most Liverpool fans – but, crucially, not to the club’s recruitment team.
Liverpool haven’t suddenly turned their attention to Ekitike after missing out on Isak. He was a long-term target.
The media first got wind of their interest in the Frenchman long before the end of his breakout season in Germany, but nearly every elite European club has been monitoring his progress since he started making a real name for himself at Reims following a highly successful loan spell at Danish outfit Vejle, in 2021.
Indeed, Newcastle first tried to sign Ekitike in January 2022 but he joined Paris Saint-Germain instead that summer, admitting that, as a Frenchman, he found the lure of Parc des Princes impossible to resist. In hindsight, that move was a mistake. There was very little room for such a raw teenage talent in a forward line containing Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappe.
“I progressed at such a high speed at Reims, but I also came back down at the same speed,” Ekitike later explained. “Not everyone has experienced that and I don’t wish it on anyone, it’s not easy.”
Eintracht offered him a way out of PSG in the summer of 2023, but he was initially reluctant to take it, so desperate was he to prove himself at Paris. However, after earning just nine minutes of game time during the first half of the season, Ekitike belatedly accepted a move to Deutsche Bank Park in January 2024 – and he’s not looked back since.
Ekitike improved exponentially in Frankfurt. As he said himself, he went from substitute to star in just over a year. Forming a formidable partnership with Omar Marmoush was key, but it was the way in which he revelled in the role of leading man following the Egyptian’s January move to Manchester City that really made Liverpool and others sit up and take notice.
There was a legitimate fear that Eintracht’s bid to finish in the top four of the الدوري الألماني would collapse without Marmoush – but Ekitike excelled as a lone frontman. He was directly involved in 12 goals after Marmoush’s exit – seven of which he scored himself – as Dino Toppmoller’s ended up finishing third.
By that point, sporting director Markus Krosche knew that the club had little chance of holding onto “one of the most interesting players on the European market”. His only objective, therefore, was ensuring that Eintracht got top dollar for their prized possession – and it’s fair to say that it’s been realised.
There’s simply no hiding the fact that a fee that could rise to £79m ($106m) is an outrageous sum of money for an inexperienced forward who Eintracht paid €16.5m (£14/$19m) for just 18 months ago. At least Uruguay international Nunez had impressed in the Champions League; Ekitike has only made four goal-less appearances in Europe’s premier club cup competition, while he’s yet to be capped at senior level by France.
However, all of that doesn’t necessarily mean that Liverpool have signed another dud – far from it, in fact.
For starters, Ekitike has all of the attributes that Liverpool are looking for in a mobile centre-forward. He’s a graceful and elusive runner capable of dropping deep or drifting wide in order to make full use of his pace and wide array of skills with the ball at his feet – which also make him incredibly dangerous on the break. His clever movement also creates space for others to exploit, in much the same way Roberto Firmino did at Anfield for so many years.
Of course, there are valid concerns over his finishing, given his shot conversion rate last season was a very underwhelming 14.3 percent. However, that did have an awful lot to do with the fact that so many of Ekitike’s efforts on goal were from outside the area or awkward angles, as he was encouraged to be less selfless and back himself more to score from anywhere. Indeed, when it came to what Opta calls ‘Big chances’, Ekitike was far more efficient, boasting a strike rate of 43.2%.
Clearly, he still has much to work on – but he’s well aware of his deficiencies, and the feeling in France is that Ekitike could enjoy a Thierry Henry-like explosion in England. Ekitike has long been compared to the Arsenal legend because of his tall, slender frame and fondness for gliding in from the left wing onto his favoured right foot. However, among his current peers, he’s tellingly most similar in stature, style and statistics to Isak – which is why Liverpool always considered him the ideal alternative to the Swede.
Clearly, Ekitike is not yet on the same level as Isak, but the point is that he could be soon, particularly as he’s long been lauded as much for his mindset as his technique, with one of his friends telling بالجم that “Hugo has the mentality of Kobe Bryant.”
Ekitike’s former coach at Reims, Oscar Garcia, agreed: “There is something very special about Hugo. He’s a young man with a lot of quality. He also has a lot to improve on but he works so hard in training.”
He always has, too. His industry and humility set him apart when he was a kid coming through at Cormontreuil. When he moved to Denmark, meanwhile, the worry was that he might struggle because he wasn’t just moving to a new country, but doing so at a time when Covid-19 restrictions were still in place. However, a source close to the striker told بالجم “When he understood the situation, he looked at his agent and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll manage.’ He was only a kid but he showed great maturity.”
It was a similar story at PSG. He may have struggled for minutes on the pitch, but he made the absolute most of every second he spent training with Messi and Mbappe.
“They’re unique players. No one plays and no one will play like them,” he explained. “I would have been the stupidest of players, the stupidest of human beings, if I hadn’t learned something. And I learned a lot watching them with regard to certain little things or how they are off the ball. Making a dummy run, then making another run… Kylian really made an impression on me with that. It was impressive and seeing that, I said to myself that it was really that level that I wanted to reach.”
Liverpool have given him a glorious opportunity to do so and, unlike Nunez, Ekitike has both the requisite talent and temperament to take it.
