Birmingham City have signed Allsvenskan’s top scorer August Priske – we speak to a Djurgården expert for the lowdown
Danish striker August Priske in action for Djurgarden(Image: )
August Priske could make his Birmingham City debut tomorrow as Blues take on Stoke City at St Andrew’s.
That comes just a few days after the young striker made a big money move from Swedish outfit Djurgården – reported as worth £6million – signing a five-and-half-year contract.
In doing so he became Blues’ fourth signing of the January transfer window and by some distance the most exciting as Chris Davies looks to add pace, power and a focal point to his team.
The Blues boss has urged patience with the 21-year-old whose career is still at an embryonic stage, but having scored 18 goals in the Allsvenskan last season, the potential is obvious.
The Keep Right On podcast spoke to Expressen’s Djurgården reporter Jonathan Aronsson Fält for the low down on a centre forward nicknamed Jesus Prisk-us.
Tell us about August Priske
JAF: I would say it’s been been quite a journey for him. He arrived at Djurgårdens and his first season was quite up and down.
They had another very, very good striker who left after that season so they had to bring another striker and he didn’t work out.
So during the spring Djurgårdens had a lot of trouble and for Priske it was ups and downs again. He scored two goals before the summer break – and then something happened.
I’ve asked him so many times and maybe it’s difficult even for him to actually nail what happened. In Sweden we play thirty rounds in the league and going into round fourteen Priske had scored two goals.
Then there was a summer break he scored sixteen after that so it’s an explosion you could say.
When you talk to August and you talk to the manager and the assistant coaches – and it’s always easy to say those kind of things when he obviously became such an enormous success – but people are are saying that we believed all the way this could happen.
He’s a young guy so it’s maybe not that weird that it took some time – and also in a new country, he joined from from Denmark
Were Djurgården fairly compensated?
JAF: We’ve been talking to him about these rumours for like half a year. Even last summer, there were talks about Red Bull Salzburg, for example.
So we have been able to talk to him a lot about his next step, which we all knew would come one day.
But he was always quite clear and I think he spoke about it in the press release from Birmingham as well, that the sporting project has been very important to him.
Maybe I think that at least the supporters thought that they would get a couple more millions, I would say.
You have to say that he’s also handled all this fuss around him brilliantly. To go back to this Red Bull Salzburg story, it came basically out of nothing. It was in the end of the window when he just had started to score goals.
And you can imagine, he’s a young guy all of a sudden, this great sporting project comes up. But he’s been brilliant all the way.
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Can you tell us more about the type of striker he is and what we can expect to see?
JAF: I wrote a piece about his goal scoring at the end of the season and actually for the first time I went back and watched all his eighteen goals in 2025 and when you look at them it’s quite a funny.
I don’t know if random is the right word, but he scored goals in all kind of ways. I mean, there’s the headers. That’s one of his good qualities, I would say.
Sometimes he tried it from distance, there’s also these ugly goals which are goals that a goal scorer should score as well.
I would say once he started to score he scored goals in all kind of manners.
Talking about his playing style, obviously he’s quite tall. He’s maybe not the most muscular guy, but obviously with his length, he has that kind of physicality that I can imagine he will need in the Championship.
Also quite fast.
I would say that one of the parts in his game that he has really developed during the last couple of months is the link-up play.
I think he’s been a smart footballer all the way, but during maybe the last ten games in Allsvenskan last year, I think that you really could see that he connected very well with his wingers, with his midfielders in a different way in comparison to early on.
So quite a quite a complete player but obviously as we said in the beginning it’s still a young guy, 21-years-old and this sample size of him actually scoring goals on a regular basis is quite small. It’s basically the last six months, more or less.
August Priske in action for Djurgarden(Image: )
What level do we think he can reach?
JAF: The sky’s the limit. I would say you never know and if there was a question mark, the sample size is quite small. He averaged basically one goal per game during the last six months.
You could also say that’s a good thing because if he managed to take that step, why wouldn’t he be able to do it in Birmingham?
The nickname – Jesus Prisk-us
JAF: Priske has been so close to the supporters, that’s actually also something you should pinpoint. If you would have asked me about Priske before he started to score goals, I would tell you that he was quite of a cult player back then.
Obviously you don’t have to be the best player to become a cult player but I think that also says something about who he is.
He had a tough and rough start in Djurgården but he’s still the kind of guy who you know he would fight for the badge, his body language is always on an acceptable level, he pushes his teammates.
So i think that the Djurgården supporters really liked him even before he started to score goals.
I think that kind of relationship also built on this Jesus Prisk-us thing, obviously he started to do this celebration which has to do with the stickers.
There was actually a supporter who got a Jesus Prisk-us tattoo. So yeah, he’s made his mark, you could say.
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