Liverpool shocked fans across the country as their interest in launching an audacious effort to sign Newcastle’s star striker Alexander Isak was revealed on Tuesday.
A deal for the Swede would cost up to £130million and would smash the British transfer record just a month after the Reds broke it with a stunning £116m move for Florian Wirtz from Bayer Leverkusen.
Newcastle are holding firm on Isak and are adamant he won’t leave St James’ Park as they gear up for a return to the Champions League.
But merely targeting their key attacker doesn’t appear to be enough for Arne Slot, with the Reds also now in line to sign Hugo Ekitike, who Newcastle have tracked since 2022 and bid £70m for earlier this week.
The Magpies have now dropped out of the race, with Liverpool given free rein to sign the highly-rated striker – which would take their summer spending to around £270m as they look to retain the Premier League title.
Ekitike’s arrival would surely rule out a further spending splash on Isak, but how do the two compare?
Newcastle signed Isak for £63m from Real Sociedad in a club record deal in 2022, surpassing the £40m they had spent on Joelinton three years earlier.
But the price tag has never weighed heavily on the forward.
He hit the ground running, scoring against Liverpool at Anfield on his debut and has never looked back.
The Swedish international has hit 54 goals in 86 Premier League games and seven in 18 in domestic cups.
Last season the 25-year-old scored 23 times in the league, 27 in all competitions, only trailing behind top scorer Mohamed Salah in the goal charts.
Hugo Ekitike, two years his junior, enjoyed an equally prosperous campaign, scoring 22 times, 15 of which came in the Bundesliga.
He first signed for Frankfurt for the second half of the 2023/24 season from Paris Saint-Germain before completing a permanent €16.5m (£14.3m) switch on a five-year deal last summer.
Both strikers led their sides to Champions League qualification in 2024-25 and have garnered Thierry Henry comparisons.
But the similarities don’t end there.
Isak started 41 matches in all competitions in 2024/25, two fewer than his French counterpart, while they lasted almost equal periods on the pitch – Isak playing 79 minutes on average and Ekitike 76.
In that time the Newcastle forward racked up 33 goal contributions, one fewer than Ekitike’s 34.
But Isak comes out on top on clinicality. His shot conversion rate last season was 23.7 per cent, almost a third higher than Ekitike 14.3 per cent.
Likewise his big chance conversion rate was seven per cent higher at 50 per cent.
But Ekitike displays highlight a more rounded game and he has been praised for the variety of ways he can endanger defences.
He provided 12 assists, double Isak’s number, while he also created 19 big chances, compared to the Swede’s 13.
Ekitike’s eight assists in last season’s Bundesliga stemmed from only 44 key passes, while he completed the sixth highest number of dribbles in the league.
His heat map also shows him covering the middle of the pitch in much higher frequency.
Unlike Isak he started last campaign in a two-man striking partnership, forming a lethal combination up top with Omar Marmoush, the man Ekitike described as his ‘partner in crime’, before the Egyptian was signed by Manchester City in January.
The France youth international was then played a lone striker, with Mario Gotze pulling the strings behind him, in the second half of the season.
‘He is a complete striker,’ Christopher Michel, Frankfurt reporter at Absolut Fussball told Mail Sport.
‘He’s fast, he can shoot with both feet. He can head the ball well. He’s brilliant with his back to goal. He’s tall. He can dribble. He provides assists. He can be a playmaker.
‘He has the potential to be one of the best strikers in Europe. I even think he has more talent than Omar Marmoush.’
Meanwhile, in February, Isak was described as the ‘best striker in the Premier League’ by Jamie Carragher, while Newcastle legend Alan Shearer branded him ‘world class’.
Neither striker is short of admirers and the two look set to come head to head in the Premier League scoring charts next season.
