The perfect striker is right there - but nobody wants him
It’s no secret that we’re on the brink of a striker transfer merry-go-round this summer. Benjamin Sesko, Alexander Isak, Hugo Ekitike, Liam Delap, Victor Osimhen and Victor Gyokores have all been linked to big moves to some of the biggest clubs in England. Every one of these strikers have admirable qualities that make it no surprise that they are highly desired by Europe’s elite however, barring Isak who might even be too expensive to move anyway, I’d say all of these strikers have various different weaknesses that I assume are casting doubts in the minds of scouts.
If you’re paying £50 million + for a striker, you’d want guaranteed goals almost instantly but I can’t be sure that all of these number 9’s would deliver on this task. All great players yes, but many are still quite raw and some are just too expensive, whether that is through their wage demands or the overall transfer fee.
However there seems to be one striker that I’ve seen no real links to. A striker who currently is scoring at a better rate than all but Gyokores but he’s doing it in a top 5 league. He’s the complete package and in my opinion he’s got all that you could want in a modern-day striker and I don’t think he’d cost much either, in comparison to some of these other names.
Mateo Retegui. 26 years old. The answer to Italy’s absence of superstar strikers. He’s got 25 goals and 7 assists in 35 Serie A games this season whilst not even being a consistent starter for parts of it. As a striker he’s got it all - link up play, fantastic box movement, great instincts and a vast array of different finishes in his game. For the life of me, I can’t understand why I haven’t seen anything about him moving away from Atalanta after this season because this is an elite 9 who deserves to be playing amongst the best of them. He spent most of his career perfecting his craft in Argentina before moving to Genoa in 2023/24 and impressing enough to get a move to Gan Piero Gasperini’s side in the summer and he hasn’t looked back once.
Maybe these clubs are seeing something I’m not because I think Retegui is far more complete than a lot of the forwards being thrown around for copious sums of money that don’t match what they’ve shown on the pitch. With Retegui you know what you’re getting - a complete forward in their prime who knows how to find the back of the net, no matter how unattractive it might look.
There’s a lot of big clubs in need of strikers this summer and so ‘Il Re Tigre’ may just end up at one of them due to his relatively low rumoured release clause. Whoever gets him will be pulling off one of the moves of the summer.
A throwback to the Serie A strikers of 10 years ago… Cavani, Higuian, Icardi - Retegui gives me shades of all of them. At a time where clubs are obsessed with young players who haven’t hit their peak yet, Retegui is sitting right there - scoring goals for fun and nobody is biting.
We’ll see if anyone does because if they do, they’ve got themselves one of the best strikers in the world.
