The Liverpool ECHO’s Liverpool FC correspondent Paul Gorst assesses the form of Hugo Ekitike, who leads the Reds’ goalscoring chats with 10 so far this season
Hugo Ekitike and Arne Slot applaud the travelling fans after Liverpool won 5-1 at the former’s old club Eintracht Frankfurt in the Champions League earlier this season (Image: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images)
If Hugo Ekitike was unaware as to the size of the football club he was joining in July, his very first minutes as a Liverpool player will have dispelled any doubt. The official confirmation of his £79m switch from Eintracht Frankfurt was still being absorbed by the club’s fans when he was introduced to his new colleagues on the pitch of the Kai Tak Stadium in Hong Kong on July 24.
That Ekitike just happened to also be greeted by 25,000 supporters at a venue that is comfortably more than 6,000 miles away from Anfield will have been all the evidence needed as to the scale of his new employers.
“Obviously I knew it was big, coming to a big club, but I didn’t know it was that big,” he revealed this week. “I was like: ‘Oh, that’s cool!’”
At the time, Ekitike might have felt like the warm-up act at Liverpool. Having seen the club bring in £116m Florian Wirtz just a few weeks earlier before continuing their pursuit to make Alexander Isak Isak a British-record capture at £125m, it would have been easy for a recently-turned 23-year-old to have accepted his status as a deputy to those with the bigger reputations and more exorbitant transfer fees.
Nearly five months on, however, it’s fair to say Ekitike is emerging as the main man at just the right time. With a sub-par Mohamed Salah now out of the equation while on duty at the Africa Cup of Nations and a half-fit Isak still looking to replicate his Newcastle United exploits, Ekitike might just have noticed that the throne is currently vacant at Anfield.
Successive doubles against Leeds United and Brighton & Hove Albion in the Premier League have seen him become the youngest player to register back-to-back braces since the days of Michael Owen. And the 23-year-old is aiming to become the first since Luis Suarez to do so in three successive fixtures, which the Uruguayan achieved during a memorable period of December 2013.
It’s an impressive list for Ekitike to rub shoulders with at such a fledgling stage of his Anfield career.
The pace, the power and the poise have all been on show in abundance of late and while there are rough edges to smooth, the Frenchman is staking his claim to become Liverpool’s first top scorer not named Mo Salah since Philippe Coutinho, way back in 2017.
A rip-roaring second half to the campaign for Salah, who is currently on five goals, cannot be discounted, but Ekitike’s flurry of recent strikes now sees him on 10 for the term. At a time when the entire club are looking to delicately emerge from a deeply unsettling period that saw them on their worst sequence for decades, Arne Slot owes the France international a great debt of gratitude for how he has led the line.
“His ability to score, his technique, his speed, all these things, that’s just what he has, so no-one is surprised to see that,” the Reds boss said when asked about his No.22 on Friday. “But he improved a lot in terms of how much he runs during a game and how hard he works. That’s a big help for the team as well.”
Liverpool fended off competition from Newcastle and Manchester United to land Ekitike in the summer. It’s understood Frankfurt’s sporting director Markus Krosche was contacted by Christopher Vivell, the Red Devils’ director of recruitment personally, while Magpies’ efforts to bring in Ekitike saw them privately detail, in bombastic terms, how they wanted to see the striker paired up top with Isak. They were half right in that regard at least.
It is Liverpool’s belief that, in time, the former Paris Saint-Germain youngster can develop into one of the world’s very best frontmen and the data available to the number-crunchers at Anfield revealed that only Kylian Mbappe and Erling Haaland have shown to have ‘better’ potential at the same age.
Like the aforementioned stats around Owen and Suarez, that is quite the company to keep for Ekitike. For now, though, the forward will simply be concentrating on emerging from a crowded pack of talented frontmen at Anfield.
So far, so good in that sense and he may never have a better chance to take the crown.