West Ham have had plenty of failures up front over the years, but there is good reason to hope their latest signing can succeed in the Premier League.
We’ve been here before.
This isn’t the first time West Ham will head into a Premier League season hoping that they have finally found a solution to their ongoing problems in the centre-forward position.
Niclas Füllkrug has arrived for a fee of £27 million from Borussia Dortmund, which isn’t a huge amount of money for a player who has scored fairly consistently in the Bundesliga for the last two seasons, played well in the Champions League final last season and has just got back from a decent showing as an impact sub for an impressive Germany side at Euro 2024.
But West Ham fans may be careful about getting too excited.
They have signed plenty of centre-forward flops in recent times. In the last few years, they’ve wasted big money on Sébastien Haller and Gianluca Scamacca, and not long before that we saw the likes of Jordan Hugill, Enner Valencia, Emmanuel Emenike and Simone Zaza, each signed to lead the line but each ended up failing. Those players managed just 21 goals between them in 129 Premier League appearances in West Ham colours.
It might be too soon to call Danny Ings a flop, but his record so far of three goals in 37 league games suggests the 32-year-old is unlikely to provide the goals he was signed to score.
The consistent failure of just about everyone who former manager David Moyes brought in to play up top has meant Michail Antonio has largely remained first-choice in that position despite the fact that he hasn’t always been a centre-forward, isn’t a natural goalscorer (never scoring more than 10 goals in a season), has struggled persistently with injuries and is now 34 years old.
Antonio was for a few years a very capable striker; a brilliant hold-up forward who did a sensational job of bringing others into the game, ran the channels tirelessly and whose relentless work rate gave defenders nightmares.
But he also always remained a limited option, whether that was in terms of his goalscoring or his availability due to injury problems. That has meant West Ham have continued to look for something better, and last season wide forward Jarrod Bowen started 16 Premier League games through the middle. He is a good option there, but when Bowen starts up front, West Ham lose one of their most dangerous players from his best position out wide.
Antonio’s limitations led to the recent signings of Haller and Scamacca, but neither worked out. Under the leadership of Julen Lopetegui, the hope is that West Ham might finally have found their man in Füllkrug.
He arrives in London off the back of a decent season in front of goal, scoring 12 goals in 27 Bundesliga starts, plus three more in Dortmund’s run to the Champions League final.
As we saw at Euro 2024, Füllkrug doesn’t need many opportunities or much time on the pitch to score. He scores through getting into great positions and clinical finishing rather than high shot volume, with 20.7% of his shots in the Bundesliga last season finding the net, and 41.4% of his shots on target beating the goalkeeper. His two goals at the Euros came from just 161 minutes of action, and it was very nearly three, but he was unfortunate to hit the post with a close-range effort in the quarter-final defeat to Spain.
His output at this summer’s tournament means he now has 13 goals in 21 international appearances, having scored at a quite astonishing rate of a goal every 63.6 minutes. When it comes to major tournaments, he scores even more often, with a goal every 56.8 minutes – the best rate of any player to play in 5+ games at major tournaments for Germany in the national team’s history.
Füllkrug is a master of sharp movements inside the penalty area to beat defenders to the ball and get into dangerous goalscoring positions. Of his 53 shots last season (mostly for Dortmund but including a few for Werder Bremen at the start of the season before he moved clubs), 38 (71.7%) were first-time efforts – the second-highest proportion of all players to attempt at least 50 shots. The vast majority of his shots were taken from inside the penalty area (86.2%), too, and most of them were taken from within the width of the goal posts, both of which significantly increase his chances of scoring.
It isn’t like he is solely focused on scoring, though. With eight assists in the Bundesliga last season, he was just outside the league’s top 10 players, and level with Harry Kane.
Füllkrug’s hold-up play is another aspect of his game for which he stands out, with a great deal of his work focused on bringing others into play. In the Bundesliga in 2023-24, only Wout Weghorst (16.7%) saw a higher proportion of his passes qualify as lay-offs than Füllkrug (14.2%), who ranked fourth overall for lay-offs that found a teammate (59). His touch map also shows he doesn’t only get on the ball in areas where he will threaten goal.
West Ham’s new forward is also very good in the air, winning 80 aerial duels across the course of last season and scoring three headed goals. The last-gasp headed equaliser he scored for Germany against Switzerland at this summer’s Euros sticks in the mind, while he also ranked fifth in the Bundesliga last season for flick-ons that found a teammate, with 21.
That aerial ability will surely come in handy with set-piece expert James Ward-Prowse sharing the pitch with Füllkrug, and his hold-up play will help to bring West Ham’s best attackers in Bowen and Mohammed Kudus into play. In all, there is plenty for Lopetegui to work with with his new centre-forward.
However, the main concern that has been raised about this move from West Ham’s perspective is the player’s age. Füllkrug is 31, and will be 35 by the time the four-year contract he has signed ends in 2028. West Ham can be pretty certain they won’t be getting any financial return on their investment, and the worry is that they won’t get much time out of him at the top level.
He could easily take a while to adapt to the Premier League – if he does at all – and there is every chance that he won’t be able to play at that level much past the age of 33. So, is this signing just papering over the cracks?
West Ham will hope he can play on for a few more years given he broke through so late, and hasn’t played a great deal of elite football. When he played for Germany in a friendly against Oman in November 2022, Füllkrug became the oldest outfielder to make his international debut for Germany in 20 years, doing so at 29 years and 280 days. He only has 157 top-flight appearances to his name.
There are a few risks involved in this deal, but if he can reproduce his Bundesliga and international form, there is every reason to believe Füllkrug can be a success. West Ham might finally have a consistent goalscoring number nine on their hands.
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