‘Useless’ Gyokeres signing blasted as huge ‘concern’ raised amid bleak comparison to Man Utd star

Viktor Gyokeres has been warned his career could fizzle out like Rasmus Hojlund’s by Frank Leboeuf, who feels he could become a “useless” Arsenal signing.

The Swede’s Arsenal debut lasted all of 60 minutes with him making little impact on the match, causing a mass pile-on from some harsher sections of the media.

But while plenty have given him the benefit of the doubt given it was only one game, Leboeuf has told Mikel Arteta to change his tactics to suit Gyokeres or risk having a Hojlund situation in his hands.

“My concern is, why do you recruit a player like Gyokeres when you know that the rest of the team won’t play that way?” Leboeuf asked on ESPN. “And they won’t do what you are expecting them to do – cross the ball a little bit quicker, without turning around, like you are playing handball.”

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“You have a player that you need to cross the ball to as quickly as possible, and if you block it, and you make it slow, that guy is useless.

“So why do you use a type of player like that? Why do you sign a player like that when, in fact, the rest of the team doesn’t understand him or his way of thinking about football?

“For me, it’s useless. And I really thought, I hope he’s going to change and score goals and everything. But I thought Hojlund signed for Arsenal and played today against his former teammates. That was the way I saw Gyokeres today.

“So I really hope that he’s not going to have the same path, you know, like Hojlund, and score many, many goals for the Gunners.

“But today, he was nowhere near it, because it wasn’t at the same level of music as the others are playing. The others were playing a kind of sloppy but slow-motion game while he was trying to get more vertical – one ball, one opportunity, one cross. It never happened.”

Trying to take the hat off his new striker, Arteta said in his post-match press conference that zero shots on target from the Swede showed a team problem, not an individual one.

“He did a lot of things very good. You can tell especially in our high press and rhythm that we demand, that especially in the first half we were giving a bit too much time,” Arteta summarised.

“It is something that we have to work on with him, especially there. Then in the final action situation, he did not have that many chances to do that, because in the previous action, we had to play that last ball and the last was standing still with 40 metres to play.

“We did not manage to put the ball through to exploit his quality. But overall, coming away to Man United, winning your first game with Arsenal, is a good start.”

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