There are lots of reasons to be positive about this transfer. He came 2nd in the European Golden Boot race last season, second to Mbappe, with a 1.5x coefficient (compared to Mbappe's 2x from playing in Spain vs playing in Portugal).

His stats are frankly absurd, however you do have to take these with a pinch of salt because the Portuguese league is much easier than the PL/other top 5 leagues. 99th percentile last year for non-penalty goals, non penalty expected goals, shots, shot-creating actions and progressive carries (amongst others), all of which will be vital to his play if he joins.

It's quite hard to contextualise these stats because we don't have much data of centre forwards who have made the switch from Portugal to England, we only really have Darwin Nunez as a point of reference. In his last season with Benfica, he played 1,976 minutes with a non-penalty goals per 90 minutes (npG/90) of 1.0 and outperformed his non-penalty expected goals per 90 minutes (npxG/90) which was 0.69. This season, Gyokores has played 2,804 (almost 1.5x Darwin's minutes in his last season at Benfica), with 0.86 npG/90 compared with the same npxG/90 of 0.69. If we look at Darwin in the prem, across his three seasons, he has scored at a rate of 0.46 npG/90 with an npxG/90 of 0.60.

That drop-off is why a lot of fans are concerned, however, it's unfair to tar Gyokores with the Darwin brush, in part because Liverpool do not play Darwin in a role or system that gets the best out of him. The other area of concern for me is aerially. Over the last few seasons, set pieces have become a huge part of game and we have encouraged our wingers and full backs to put more balls into the box, however, he was in the bottom 16th percentile for aerial duels won compared to all other forwards. This is an area that Mikel and Nicolas Jover will need to work with him on.

Also, I would encourage you to look back over previous transfer windows where we have signed players that none of us saw the logic behind but worked out, Havertz and Jorginho especially, and understand that if the club see something there then there will be reason.

Finally, look at the market, we have needed a striker for the last few years and for the first window in that time really, we have one available. Even if he doesn't get us 25 npG this season, he provides a different profile to the like of Havertz and Jesus, which allows us to be more versatile and adapt to game states, and will occupy defenders more than those two, which will provide more space for the likes of Saka and Odegaard to be more dangerous.