Dominic Solanke appears set for a club-record transfer to Tottenham, having proved last season that he is ready to move back to a bigger club.
This is an updated version of our article from April 2024 – The Numbers That Prove Dominic Solanke is Ready to Step (Back) Up to a Big Club
For Dominic Solanke, 2023-24 was a big season.
Having tried – and, ultimately, failed – to succeed as a talented youngster at two of England’s biggest clubs in Chelsea and Liverpool, he had done little in the first five years after leaving Anfield to prove he could make it at the top of the game.
After scoring three goals in his first 42 Premier League appearances for Bournemouth, he looked more at home in the second tier. He stormed the Championship in 2021-22, scoring 29 goals as Bournemouth earned promotion to the Premier League, but could only follow that up with six goals in the top flight in 2022-23. His first campaign back in the big time also included a goal drought of 17 hours and 20 minutes.
Another year like that last season and Solanke would have been in real danger of becoming one of those players described as ‘too good for the Championship, not good enough for the Premier League’.
But he went from strength to strength under Andoni Iraola, a manager whose style proved perfectly suited to Bournemouth’s number nine.
That front-footed style, with an aggressive press and a decent share of possession, has helped prepare Solanke for life back at a bigger club. With all due respect to Bournemouth, after the season Solanke had, it makes sense that he is reportedly “desperate” to make the move to Spurs a reality.
Having played in the Champions League aged 17 – when he became the youngest player in Chelsea’s history to appear in the competition – and with just one England cap to his name – which came some seven years ago – it is understandable that, now aged 26, Solanke wants to strike while the iron is hot.
Solanke was indeed in red-hot form last season. He finished the season fourth in the Premier League’s goalscoring charts, with 19 goals. It was the highest-scoring season by a Bournemouth player in the Premier League, overtaking Joshua King, who hit 16 in 2016-17.
Even more impressive is the fact that he scored five more goals than anyone else playing for a team in the bottom half of the table, ahead of Nottingham Forest’s Chris Wood, on 14.
And Solanke became only the 10th player in Premier League history to score as many as 19 goals for a bottom-half team.
It’s become increasingly rare for teams who finish low down the table to have a high-scoring individual. In the Premier League era, there have been 38 instances of a player finishing in the bottom half having scored 15+ goals, but only two of those have occurred in the last seven seasons – Solanke last season and Danny Ings for Southampton in 2019-20.
That means it happened 36 times in the first 25 Premier League seasons, but only twice since. These days, having a 15-goal striker usually means a top-half finish. Solanke’s season was certainly worthy of finishing in the top 10, and he was in some sense rather let down by his teammates. He may well feel he deserves to be surrounded by better players.
He also contributed goals at key times, and plenty of Bournemouth’s games were tight affairs settled by an odd goal from him. Take Solanke’s goals away from Bournemouth’s season and they would have had 15 fewer points – no player’s goals were worth more points than his in the Premier League last season.
He was more single-minded in his goalscoring last season, tasked by Iraola with staying in central attacking areas for longer periods and providing a greater goal threat. It will come as little surprise that he averaged more non-penalty goals (0.46), non-penalty expected goals (0.47), shots (3.0), and touches in the opposition box (6.5) per 90 minutes played than in any other season since he joined Bournemouth.
When it comes to totals for these numbers, he ranked fourth of all Premier League players for goals (19) and expected goals (19.6), third for shots (109), and sixth for touches in the opposition box (239).
These are elite-level numbers and he is in elite company with the Premier League’s best on each front, suggesting he is ready to step back up to an elite club. And he should be suited to playing for Ange Postecoglou’s Tottenham for a number of reasons, too.
He has improved remarkably when it comes to getting into good goalscoring positions – this accounts almost entirely for the vast increase in his output in front of goal last term. He isn’t yet an elite finisher (and may well never be), underperforming compared to his non-penalty xG by 0.6 over the course of his best season in front of goal, but he just got into far more dangerous shooting positions. He scored just six non-penalty goals from 9.2 xG in 2022-23.
And while elite finishing is obviously a massive plus in a striker, it is the ability to get into good positions close to goal that is more important in the modern game, and that is very much the case for Spurs under Postecoglou.
He doesn’t ask his striker to get involved in build-up play too much, preferring that they stay high up the pitch occupying centre-backs with the aim to getting them into central positions close to goal. Look where Spurs’ top scorers from last season, Son Heung-min and Richarlison, scored their goals from (bearing in mind that Son spent a decent chunk of the season on the left flank):
Richarlison did a very good job of leading the line for Spurs for a nine-goal, eight-game scoring streak in the winter, but he didn’t score consistently across the season, and in truth never has done in his career. There have always been doubts from the fans over the wisdom of spending £60 million on him a couple of years ago, and last season won’t have done much to remove those concerns.
Son, meanwhile, was Spurs’ best option up front in 2023-24, but he was also the best option on the left. So, playing him through the middle weakened the team elsewhere in attack.
Son struggled, however, with holding the ball up – a side of the game that doesn’t come naturally to him – unable to contend with the physical battle against big Premier League centre-backs. While Richarlison did this rather better, Solanke is more technically adept and Postecoglou will expect him to be able to do a better job on the ball.
Solanke has also shown he is a capable pressing forward. He ranked higher than every other player in the Premier League last season for pressures (1,242), pressures in the final third (703) and pressures in the final third resulting in a turnover (142).
Some of that will be down to the team he was playing for – Bournemouth were among the most proactive pressing teams in the top flight last season – but Spurs were one of few teams who pressed high up the pitch more often than Bournemouth, so Solanke should be a good fit. Spurs made more pressures in the final third (2935) and pressures in the final third resulting in a turnover (591) than any other team in the division, while on an individual player level, only Solanke was ahead of Son in both of those metrics (639 and 130).
Having spent years at Chelsea and Liverpool, Solanke knows what an elite club environment feels like, and he will know better than most other 26-year-olds what it takes to succeed at a team like Spurs. He was unable to fulfil his vast potential at both of those clubs and won’t want to make it an unwanted hat-trick.
However, the numbers suggest Solanke is a different player these days, and he looks ready to move back to a side at the top end of the Premier League. Postecoglou’s Tottenham could be the perfect fit.
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