Arsenal will spend much of this summer searching frantically for a new striker – and will do so knowing that they contrived to let one of the fastest-scoring forwards in all of Europe slip through their fingers just last year.
Last summer, the Gunners sold Mika Biereth to Austrian outfit Sturm Graz for a reported £4m. He left the Emirates without having played a single match. Now, a year on, Sturm Graz have sold the newly-minted Denmark international to AS Monaco and Biereth simply cannot stop scoring.
In Arsenal’s defence, they aren’t the only Premier League team to have overlooked Biereth on his ascent towards the top of the game. The 22-year-old spent four years on Fulham’s books, only to be passed over in favour of developing Jay Stansfield, now at Birmingham City – but given how desperate Arsenal are for a goalscorer, Biereth’s feats with Monaco may be making them feel a little sick.
Following promising loan spells in the Netherlands and Scotland, Biereth moved to Graz on an initial loan deal and quickly started scoring more and more. Since signing permanently there last summer, he bagged 14 goals in 25 matches, enough to persuade Monaco to shell out around three times what Sturm Graz had paid for the striker in January.
The French side needed someone to cover for another talented striker who was deemed surplus to requirements at Arsenal – Folarin Balogun – but probably didn’t expect the move to work out as well as it has. Nine matches into his Ligue 1 career, Biereth has already scored 11 goals, with hat-tricks against Auxerre, Nantes and Stade Reims. Only PSG’s Ousmane Dembélé has scored more in a major European league since Biereth’s transfer.
That’s only three fewer goals in the league than Arsenal have scored as a whole since the move. With Gabriel Jesus and Kai Havertz (not that either has ever been a reliable source of goals), Arsenal have lacked any kind of cutting edge up front and are watching a player they discarded outscore almost everyone else on the continent.
Biereth once joking reffered to his playing skill as that of “a s**t [Erling] Haaland and a s**t [Harry] Kane – a hybrid of them at a much worse level”, but is now outdoing both, at least over the last two or three months. And now Biereth, who was also qualified for England, Germany and Bosnia & Herzegovina, is a full international having made his debut for Denmark on Thursday night.
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