Erling Haaland starts most games as the top goalscorer on the pitch. For Tuesday’s trip to Sporting CP, the Manchester City striker will have to settle for second place.
Haaland has a staggering 17 goals in 18 matches for club and country this season but that is nothing compared to Sporting striker Viktor Gyokeres, who has 24 goals in 20.
These are phenomenal numbers from the 26-year-old, who also boasts 45 goals in 43 Portuguese top-flight matches since moving to Sporting at the start of last season. But it is even more impressive given this is the same striker who struggled in the Championship as recently as four years ago.
On loan from Brighton, who tend to spot a talented player in Europe, Gyokeres went goalless in 11 second-tier appearances for Steve Cooper’s Swansea in the 2020-21 season.
Fresh from a promising loan spell at German second division side St Pauli, it was disappointing. The Swans spell was cut short midway through the campaign and he was handed another loan at Coventry City.
Three goals in 19 matches in the second half of the season led to a debate amongst the Coventry hierarchy: was he good enough to sign permanently or was he not worth the risk? That question seems silly now.
“I think you could have argued on both sides, to be honest,” former Coventry assistant manager Adi Viveash tells Sky Sports. “You could have said: is it a bit of a gamble?
“He went to Swansea with Steve Cooper on loan at the start of the season. The next time I saw him was when we played them in the Covid year. With all due respect, he never got a kick. Kyle McFadzean marked him out of the game!
“The loan in the second six months of that season, he still had the same frustrations with us. He was a very different player then to what he ended up leaving Coventry as. Not as strong, not as powerful. He could be a little bit shoved off the ball a bit.
“I didn’t feel he played the central role well then. He still wanted to drift into wide areas. Avoid a little bit of contact, I suppose, with his back to goal. That’s how it looked.”
The idea that Gyokeres was once a player easily barged off the ball is baffling considering his levels right now. His two Champions League goals this season have been remarkably similar: solo runs down the left, holding off and barging past a defender, then a clinical finish.
So what happened to that struggling striker, who has suddenly propelled himself to Haaland-esque levels now? When Gyokeres looks back at his career, he will look at Coventry making the loan deal permanent for less than £1m in the summer of 2021 as the springboard for his confidence.
“It was almost as though you’d signed a different player,” recalls Viveash. “The next season he came in with the confidence of being bought by a team, and suddenly he’d been told that he was going to be the main man. And he looked like the main man.
“He built himself up, he’d obviously worked hard in the off-season in the gym, and the contacts with his back to goal? He started smashing centre-backs around in training! And it was a real eye-opener for all of us to go: ‘OK, this lad means business now’.”
Three goals in 30 Championship games became 38 goals in 91 matches in the next two seasons at Coventry. His 21 second-tier goals in the 2022-23 season not only caught the eye of Sporting – but nearly took the Sky Blues to the Premier League. Only a defeat to Luton Town in the Championship play-off final denied that reality, Gyokeres even got a classy assist for Coventry’s equaliser at Wembley.
“You know when someone’s getting good, don’t you?” says Viveash. “When the opposition want to talk about him. After every game, you went into the manager’s room and Vik was the name that was being mentioned.
“I don’t think anybody had seen a striker like that in the Championship. And he just improved all facets of his game.”
Coventry was the team that made Gyokeres the all-round centre forward we see today. As seen in the first and last strikes against Estrela Amadora, similar to his two Champions League goals so far this season, the Swedish forward likes to attack or move off the left wing to get goalscoring chances.
“He scored a lot of goals coming off the left like this for St Pauli, a lot of goals,” recalls Viveash. “When he was playing as a No 9, we wanted him to trust that his team-mate was going to arrive in that left space and he could attack the front or the middle zones. In the end, he got some really good goals.
“So we tried to make it that he went right as well as left, so he sort of drifted along the front three.”
He is also not just a goalscorer, the 26-year-old also has 11 assists and 74 chances created in 43 league matches for Sporting since he joined the club just over a year ago.
But Coventry also prepared him for the expectations of a top club expecting to win. When Gyokeres became good, so did the Championship. Both the player and the club had to deal with the transition from league underdogs to breaking teams down in a low block.
“His ability to run and keep running is the thing that set him apart in the Championship, because the strikers at other teams, they could produce three or four brilliant runs, but he would do 12, 13, 14,” says Viveash.
“If you give Vik half a pitch with a high line and you get the line wrong, you’re never going to catch him because he’s going to keep making the run in behind.
“In the Championship, the defences began to drop. So he had to receive it to feet and then he’d have to do a lot to get goals. We knew we had a physical machine, in the end the honing on the work was creating space.
“So I did a lot of work with him in tight areas. It took a lot of cajoling to get him to understand and buy into that. He’s one of those players that it took quite a long time for him to see the benefit of why.”
That was because Gyokeres had his own personality. First, the shy striker at the beginning of his time at Coventry became the obsessive goalscorer with a sheer drive for success.
“Vik loved to just have a bag of balls on his own every single day and you’d have to get him in because he would be out once it was dark,” recalls Viveash. “He’d do a lot of stuff off a rebound board and finish. I think he improved definitely his left foot with things like that.
“He would also get frustrated if he went three or four games without a goal. That was a difficult period for him in all the seasons, especially the two he played regularly at Coventry.”
But then an ego began to develop at Coventry as the goals kept flying in. The Swedish forward felt he was outgrowing Coventry and it could now be argued he is doing the same at Sporting.
“He grunted a lot,” adds Coventry’s former assistant coach. “Me and him, we had a real interesting working relationship, because I’m a very driven coach and demand a lot, and he’s a very driven personality, demands a lot.
“Vik would want to do training sessions to be the way Vik wanted to work. He wanted to do finishing at a certain time, he wanted to do this, he wanted to do that. He had a strong character, strong personality and when you get two of you like that, then you have to find a way of communicating.
“And you’d butt heads at times, for the good of each other really, but he certainly understood his worth as time went on. He was almost unplayable in the Championship in a lot of those games.
“But towards the end of that season, there were frustrations and things around him as an individual, maybe that’s when, whether his head was being turned.
“He became quite difficult. And I think he’d be honest with that. He became quite difficult to work with in terms of trying to train every day.”
Gyokeres eventually got his move despite Coventry “doing everything they could” to keep him, according to Viveash. “He was never going to play in the Championship again,” adds the assistant boss. The striker’s final game for the club was the Championship play-off final loss to Luton.
It led him to Sporting, then the Champions League, then Tuesday’s match with Premier League champions Manchester City.
“That’ll be interesting because then you are playing against the elite of the elite and it’d be interesting how he does against that type of centre half,” says Viveash.
“But if City play the way they do, brilliant, but if they leave 1v1 at the back, that’ll be interesting. How far he has progressed against the best?
“But he definitely got the power, the running capability, the confidence that strikers have to have to be a No 9 in the Premier League, and in the top clubs. He’s definitely got all that and he looks like he’s got the goalscoring.”
Tuesday’s Champions League tie in Lisbon feels like a big stage for Gyokeres. Can he really be comparable to Haaland? If he is, a move away from Sporting looks on the cards, with City even a possible destination.
Remember, remember the fifth of November. The day Haaland met his match?
