Viktor Gyökeres is being linked with a move to Arsenal off the back of a stunning season for Sporting CP. We look at the striker’s record in Portugal and dust off the Opta Power Rankings to provide context to his achievements.
It doesn’t seem to matter how good or proven a player is, whenever a team you don’t like is reportedly signing someone, the reflex reaction is to convince yourself they’re not that good.
Had Dundee signed prime Lionel Messi back in the day, you would have seen Dundee United fans saying with absolute sincerity that he’s too reliant on his left foot and will struggle to do it on a cold Tuesday night at St Mirren.
With Arsenal’s need for a striker made very clear by anyone who has discussed the Gunners in recent times, it felt like a significant development to see strong links emerge over the weekend with Sporting CP’s Viktor Gyökeres.
We recently looked in depth at the Sweden international, comparing him to the other forward linked with a move to north London, RB Leipzig’s Benjamin Sesko.
It looks like Gyökeres has been selected, though, and it’s not hard to see why. He scored a remarkable 39 goals in 33 Primeira Liga games last season, and 54 in 52 games overall.
It will not just be the goals that Arsenal are signing him for as Gyökeres is an excellent all-round player, working hard both creatively as well as off the ball.
That said, the Gunners will primarily want a striker who knows where the net is, and his numbers suggest that Gyökeres absolutely screams: “There it is!”
Or do they?
The inevitable riposte from rival fans is that scoring that many goals in Portugal does not mean he can score anything like as many in England.
As suggested, those arguments largely come from a place of hopeful cynicism, but you could also argue that they’re not entirely without credence.
We recently looked at the world’s strongest domestic leagues according to the Opta Power Rankings, with the English Premier League comfortably in first. The Portuguese Primeira Liga was in eighth, behind the usual big five (England, Italy, Spain, Germany and France), the Belgian Jupiler Pro League and even the English Championship, where Gyökeres made his name prior to moving to Lisbon.
For those unfamiliar, the Opta Power Rankings assess and rate over 15,000 men’s and women’s teams across the globe based on advanced performance metrics. From this, we can identify which leagues are home to the highest concentration of elite clubs – a useful indicator of overall league strength. For a deeper explainer and a chance to analyse every team for yourself, visit the below link:
Opta Power Rankings Explained
FootballOpta Power Rankings: Who Are the Best Football Teams in the World?
10 months ago Peter McKeeverOn top of that, there are numerous examples of players who scored a lot of goals in the Primeira Liga who were unable to repeat the trick in other big leagues, including the Premier League.
One who immediately comes to mind is Darwin Núñez, who scored 26 goals in 28 Primeira Liga games in the 2021-22 season for Benfica but has struggled for consistency in England. He still hasn’t matched that total in three full seasons with Liverpool, scoring 25 times in 95 Premier League appearances.
Mehdi Taremi scored 64 goals in 122 games for Porto in the Primeira Liga, but has been unable to establish himself at Inter since moving to the Serie A champions last summer, scoring just once in 26 league games last season – albeit only seven were starts.
Carlos Vinícius netted 18 times for Benfica in the 2019-20 season, which earned him a move to Tottenham Hotspur, but the Brazilian hasn’t scored more than six times in a league campaign for any of his subsequent clubs, including Spurs, PSV and Fulham.
Going further back, Jackson Martínez scored 77 goals in 141 Primeira Liga games for Porto, but a move to Atlético Madrid did not work out, with the Colombian scoring just twice in 15 La Liga games in 2015-16 before moving to the Chinese Super League.
Looking specifically at Sporting strikers in the last 15 years, Ricky van Wolfswinkel, Islam Slimani and Bas Dost all scored plenty of goals in the Primeira Liga for the Lisbon club, only to struggle when it came to doing the same in one of Europe’s top five leagues.
There are some recent success stories, though, when it comes to the Premier League. Neither are strikers but Bruno Fernandes and Rúben Dias both moved seamlessly into England’s top flight straight from Portugal.
Evanilson recorded 13 goals in 27 league games for Porto in 2023-24, and while he hasn’t quite kept up that strike rate in England with 10 goals in 31 Premier League matches for Bournemouth in 2024-25, the Brazilian was a success on the south coast last season.
Gyökeres also scored a lot more goals than any of those other players managed in Portugal. In fact, the only other players in the last 20 years to score at least 39 goals in a season in one of Europe’s top 10 leagues are Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Robert Lewandowski and Luis Suárez.
One potential concern is that Gyökeres scored a large number of his goals against teams that finished lower in the table. Despite averaging 1.18 goals per game in the Primeira Liga in 2024-25, he only managed two goals in eight games against teams that finished between second and fifth in the table, while 17 of his 39 goals (43.6%) came in seven games against the bottom four.
But how do teams in the Primeira Liga compare to teams in England? It’s not an exact science, but to get an idea, we can look at their placing in the Opta Power Rankings. For the sake of this comparison, we’ll look at where they were placed just after the 2024-25 season ended (1 June 2025).
In terms of the better teams in Portugal, Benfica, who Gyökeres’ failed to score against in two games, were in 24th place at the end of the season, below Bournemouth, Brentford and Nottingham Forest. FC Porto, who Gyökeres scored once against in two games, were in 56th place, nine below Wolves. He also scored once against Sporting Braga, who sat two places below Sheffield United in 72nd place.
Apart from Benfica, the only other two teams Gyökeres did not score against in the league were Santa Clara (248th, two places below Luton Town) and Gil Vicente (427th, 34 places below Stockport County).
In terms of the teams he thrived against, Gyökeres scored four goals in two games against Vitória Guimarães (121st, two places below his former club Coventry), four against Moreirense (338th, 36 places below Plymouth Argyle), five against Boavista (793rd, 24 places below Wigan Athletic), and six against Estrela (667th, 56 places below Reading).
He also scored a hat-trick in his one game against Farense. They were 593rd on 1 June after getting relegated, 79 places below Blackpool.
As you can see from the graphic below, not only were the majority of Primeira Liga teams ranked well below every Premier League team at the end of last season, but also below a large number of Championship teams.
It could therefore be more relevant to look at Gyökeres’ record when he played in England’s second tier. He scored 38 goals in 94 Championship games for Coventry City across the 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons.
None of this is to denigrate Gyökeres’ achievements. To paraphrase the adage, you can only score goals against the teams in front of you, and it’s important to note that he also found the net regularly in the UEFA Champions League last season.
Sporting played 10 UCL games in 2024-25, which were in theory against similar strength opposition as Arsenal faced given the seeded format of the competition, and Gyokeres scored six goals in eight Champions League games from 4.6 xG.
He found the net against Lille, Sturm Graz and RB Leipzig, while he also scored a hat-trick in Sporting’s 4-1 thrashing of Manchester City in the league phase, albeit two of those goals came from the penalty spot.
In Arsenal’s first 10 games in the competition last season, Bukayo Saka (five appearances) and Kai Havertz (eight appearances) were their top scorers with four each. Havertz (2.7), Leandro Trossard (2.2) and Gabriel Martinelli (2.0) were the only players to have a total xG of at least 2.0 up to that point. Arsenal scored 24 goals from 16.0 xG in those first 10 games, though a lot of that overperformance came in the last-16 first leg against PSV, where they scored seven times from just 1.91 xG.
As an example of how goals can be weighted dependent on where they’re scored, despite his 39 league goals, Gyökeres came second to Kylian Mbappé for the European Golden Shoe award.
It’s not perfect, but that award measures goals by the strength of the league, so goals scored by players competing in Europe’s top five leagues – Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 1 – are worth two points. Goals in leagues ranked sixth to 22nd in UEFA’s coefficient, such as the Primeira Liga, are worth 1.5 points, while goals in lower-ranked European leagues are worth one point.
Gyökeres therefore ended on 58.5 points, behind Mbappé’s 62 points for his 31 La Liga goals for Real Madrid.
Even if there is an element of Gyökeres being a flat-track bully, maybe that’s exactly what Arsenal need. Their top scorer in the Premier League last season was Havertz, with just nine goals. It was the first time since 1923-24 the Gunners didn’t have any player score at least 10 league goals in a campaign.
There have been arguments that the biggest thing Arsenal can do to bridge the gap to Liverpool is improve their record against the so-called ‘lesser’ teams.
That said, Arsenal did have the second-best record against teams who finished in the bottom half of the Premier League last season, while they only had the fourth-best record against teams in the top half. Arteta’s men averaged 2.05 goals per game against bottom-half teams compared to 1.55 vs top-half opponents, and had a 70% win rate against bottom-half teams and just 33% vs top-half teams.
Obviously a team will generally have a better record against bottom-half sides than top (unless you’re Fulham), but those figures don’t seem to point to a particular problem for Arsenal against them barring the odd game, such as their solitary defeat to a bottom-half team at home to West Ham.
They may perhaps want to score more goals against lower teams, though. Arsenal only scored the joint-fifth most goals vs bottom-half sides last season in the Premier League (41), behind Liverpool (52), Brentford (43), Man City (42) and Newcastle (42). They drew five games against bottom-half opponents (W14 L1) but did only win two fewer points than Liverpool.
Arsenal also scored at least once against all 19 league opponents last season. There were certain teams who they did struggle to break down, though, and subsequently dropped vital points. They only scored once against Everton, who they dropped four points against, and once against Bournemouth, who they dropped six points against. They also scored just twice against Brighton and dropped four points.
Even if Gyökeres doesn’t score at anything like the incredible rate he has in Portugal, as long as he can add enough of a goal threat that it allows Arsenal to hoover up some of those lost points next season, it will all be worth it.
There is risk with any transfer, but Arsenal will have done their homework and clearly back Gyökeres to break the trend of Primeira Liga strikers moving to stronger leagues.
It will be interesting to see if he can do so, as it could very well be the difference in whether Arsenal can finally take that next step in their hunt for the Premier League title.
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Viktor Gyökeres to Arsenal: Using the Opta Power Rankings to Contextualise His Incredible Primeira Liga Goal Tally Opta Analyst.
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