Arsenal must rue selling amazing striker who’s now similar to a £172m star

This season continues to be just one disappointment after another for Arsenal.

While there was an element of hope at the start of the weekend that Mikel Arteta’s side could claw back some more ground in the Premier League title race, their defeat to West Ham United and Liverpool’s win over Manchester City has all but extinguished it.

The Gunners’ biggest problem this season has been their lacklustre attacking threat, which has been made all the more problematic by a slew of injuries to key players since Christmas.

Worse yet, a striker sold for very little by Arteta and Co in the summer is in red-hot form and has even won comparisons to another goalscorer worth an astounding £172m.

Arsenal’s 2024 sales

From an incomings perspective, it would be fair to say that the summer transfer window was nothing short of a disaster for Arsenal, especially in light of this season’s non-stop injury problems.

However, Arteta and former Sporting Director Edu Gaspar did oversee a number of quite significant outgoings, including a couple of academy graduates, like Emile Smith Rowe and Eddie Nketiah.

The former moved to Fulham for a fee that could reach £34m

, and while he’s undoubtedly someone the club could do with today thanks to his seven goal involvements this season, his sale represented good value considering he played just 196 minutes of first-team football in the 22/23 campaign and 475 minutes last season.

Likewise, while Nketiah would be able to step into the space vacated by the injured Kai Havertz and Gabriel Jesus at the moment, the fact the club were able to get £30m for a player who scored just six goals and provided three assists in 37 games last season is really quite impressive.

However, while the Gunners secured decent fees for both academy players last summer, the same cannot be said for another tremendously exciting youngster now outscoring everyone in the team this season and has been compared to arguably the best striker on the planet.

The ex-Arsenal youngster worth a king’s ransom today

As things stand, Arsenal’s top scorer this season is Havertz, who has found the back of the net 15 times and behind him in second is Bukayo Saka with just nine, so the fact that both are being outscored by a former youth player sold for peanuts last summer is far from ideal.

Mika Biereth joined the Gunners from Fulham’s academy in July 2021, and over the next three years, he would go on several loan moves to RKC Waalwijk, Motherwell and finally, Sturm Graz for the latter half of last season, where he scored nine goals and provided four assists in 22 appearances, totalling just 1624 minutes.

That means he averaged a goal involvement every 1.69 games, or every 101.84 minutes in Austria, which was enough to convince the club to make an offer of around £4m plus a small sell-on clause, which the North Londoners accepted.

For the first half of this season, the Danish marksman was on fire, scoring 14 goals and providing five assists in just 25 games, which was enough to convince AS Monaco to splash around £10.8m plus another £1.75m in add-ons for him in January.

Despite being a top-five league, and therefore a massive step up, the “terrific” 22-year-old, as dubbed by former Motherwell manager Stuart Kettlewell, has remained as prolific in the principality and has already racked up a tally of seven goals and two assists in just nine appearances, seven of which have been starts.

That means the former Gooner has scored 21 goals and provided seven assists in 34 appearances, totalling 2580 minutes, this season, which comes to an average of a goal involvement every 1.21 games, or every 92.14 minutes.

Unsurprisingly, such an incredible rate of return has seen the young forward win comparisons to some of the best strikers in the world, including Manchester City’s Erling Haaland.

The comparison primarily stems from FBref, which compares players in similar positions in Europe’s top five leagues, the Champions League and Europa League then creates a list of the ten most comparable players for each one, and in this instance, has concluded that the Norwegian is the second most similar centre-forward to the Dane.

The best way to see where this comparison has come from is to look at the underlying metrics in which the pair rank closely, including, but not limited to, non-penalty expected goals, penalty kicks, progressive carries, passing accuracy, goals per shot and more, all per 90.

On top of the prestige that comes with being compared to such an incredible number nine, such similarities are also incredibly encouraging for the Monaco ace’s future valuation, as according to Football Transfers, the City star is worth up to €207m, which is about £172m, and considering his form and statistical similarities, who’s to say Biereth won’t be worth something similar in the future.

Ultimately, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but given his sensational form and their struggles in attack, we can’t help thinking that Arsenal made a mistake in selling the 22-year-old goal machine, especially if he could one day be worth a king’s ransom.