As Newcastle do their best to hold onto Alexander Isak thinking that making a “statement” – whatever that means – is worth keeping around a notoriously moody player who clearly doesn’t want to be at the club, they are still doing their due diligence to sign a striker to replace Isak, should he end up moving to reigning Premier League champions Liverpool anyway.
Isak was the best striker in the Premier League last season, so it’s only natural for Newcastle fans and everyone else to wonder how far the downgrade will go to the next No. 9.
Yoane Wissa scored 19 goals for Brentford alongside newly-minted Manchester United signing Bryan Mbeumo, and he’s on Newcastle’s radar despite doing what is essentially a harsher version to Brentford of what Isak is doing to Newcastle.
The latest starting Premier League striker to be linked to Newcastle is Wolves forward Jorgen Strand Larsen, who just joined the Premier League last season from Celta Vigo.
Strand Larsen has also told his club that he wants to leave, tempted by the Newcastle offer, though Wolves are setting a pretty crazy asking price from the Magpies at 55 million pounds.
Given the Isak transfer rumors, the quoted price for Larsen, and the 25-year-old’s combination of age and recency in the Premier League, it’s fair to wonder how good this guy actually is.
Jorgen Strand Larsen’s playing style
Before answering that, it’s important to go from the abstract to the concrete. More specifically, it’s important to understand how that striker plays and what they are good at themselves.
Strand Larsen is purely a goal-scorer. He’s part of a new-wave of throwbacks to the days when strikers were big boys who held the ball up and scored goals. That’s what Strand Larsen does best.
Now, he did have a little bit of an all-around game in young days at the Netherlands or in Spanish football, but he’s bulked up in the Premier League and has embraced the fact that he’s a strong man who likes to shoot.
Strand Larsen has never averaged more than 0.6 key passes and 0.8 dribbles completed per game, which are both numbers he reached in his final season with Celta Vigo, when he scored 13 goals and parlayed that to a “big move” to Wolves, one of the worst teams in England.
The Norwegian international actually scored one more goal, 14, in his first season in the Premier League than he did in his best season in La Liga, which actually makes sense since, statistically speaking, fewer goals are scored per game in the Spanish top flight.
Strand Larsen, for the most part, has been very good about drawing fouls in his career, especially in La Liga, where it is both easier and more important to draw fouls since the games can get so tense in the mid and lower levels of the table where Celta were competing.
Goals are at a premium in the Premier League, and every club seeking to play in the Champions League needs a striker who can get 15 of them and preferably 20 of them.
How did Alexander Isak compare?
Since Isak scored 21 and 23 goals, respectively, in his most recent seasons with Newcastle, the Magpies are probably looking at a significant downgrade in the goals department if Strand Larsen is the Swedish star’s direct replacement at striker.
Isak’s best season in La Liga was also better from a scoring perspective than Strand Larsen’s. But those 17 goals Isak scored for Real Sociedad in 2020/21 were actually the only time he scored double-digits during his tenure with La Real, and he wouldn’t even score 10 league goals in a season until notching exactly 10 as a first-year Magpie in 2022/23. But Isak was also only 22 when he arrived at St. James’s Park for 70 million euros.
If Wolves are currently rejecting 55 million pounds for Strand Larsen, then it stands to reason that he could go for a similar amount to Isak. Fees are higher this window than in the windows closer to the pandemic with football recovering financially and the Premier League only accelerating in television revenue and interest, but that is still a massive amount for a 25-year-old who has never scored 15 goals in a season.
But just as Isak went from 17 to the low 20s in the Premier League years later, perhaps Strand Larsen, on a better team like Newcastle with the likes of Anthony Elanga and Bruno Guimaraes in the lineup, would score even more goals at Newcastle.
The other thing, though, is that Strand Larsen mostly wins in the box and off the ball; he can’t dribble past players like Isak or create chances out of nothing. He does, however, have a powerful shot in his own right and is less frustrating, often playing better with others than Isak, who is very ego-centric in his playing style.
The final verdict
All told, Strand Larsen is a decent striker. He’s good with his hold-up play, he knows his way around the penalty area, he’s a solid finisher with good scoring instincts, and he isn’t terrible at creating chances for his teammates.
There’s little that screams “60 million pound striker” about Larsen, though, and he doesn’t have that X-Factor that Isak does in helping a team get over the line as a Premier League title contender.
But Strand Larsen is better than the other options available. He’s younger and a better box presence than Wissa, and with few qualified options on the market, someone like Strand Larsen who can score 13-14 goals in a season for two pretty weak teams is not a bad get, even if, in an ideal world, he’d be more of a rotational option for a Champions League side like Newcastle than a regular starter.
I guess that is a sign of the times and how little striker talent there is in the modern Premier League that figures over 50 million pounds are being quoted here.
Joe Soriano is the editor of The Trivela Effect and a FanSided Hall of Famer who has covered world football since 2010. He’s led top digital communities like The Real Champs (Real Madrid) and has run sites covering Tottenham, Liverpool, Juventus, and Schalke. He also helped manage NFL Spin Zone and Daily DDT, covering the NFL and pro wrestling.