VIKTOR GYÖKERES is certainly right up there in Brighton’s short list of ‘ones that got away’.
The striker left the Seagulls for Coventry in a £1m deal, went on to score almost a goal a game over two seasons for Sporting Lisbon, joined Arsenal for £63.5m in the summer of 2025, and played for Sweden at the 2026 World Cup finals.
His meteoric rise from Brighton ‘reject’ to one of Europe’s hottest strikers is a story that’s unsurprisingly been seized upon by various media outlets.
“Viktor, he was a young lad at the club and was he up to the level? Well, the manager (Chris Hughton) didn’t think he was up to the level,” former teammate Glenn Murray admitted when speaking with 10bet. “We were in a squad where we were in survival mode, and you couldn’t really bring lads in to develop them.
“In all honesty, it was one of those situations where he made that hard decision to leave the Premier League and in hindsight, it was the right decision to leave.”
Murray added: “Did I see it coming what has happened? Probably not. It just shows what belief in yourself, other people’s belief and confidence can do for you.”
Born in Stockholm on 4 June 1998, Gyökeres was only five when he started playing football with IFK Aspudden-Tellus. He first drew the attention of football scouts after he had joined Stockholm-based club Brommapojkarna as a 16-year-old, initially as a winger.
“We saw that he had the abilities to be a No. 9 with his strength and breakthrough capacity and started to focus on those abilities,” Brommapojkarna scout David Eklund told ESPN. “He grew a lot and started to produce goals more and more regularly.”
He was also selected for Sweden’s national youth sides and he started to earn a ‘wonderkid’ tag. Some observers reckoned he was the country’s biggest attacking talent since Zlatan Ibrahimović.
Brighton agreed to sign him in September 2017 but he remained with Brommapojkarna until the end of their season, finishing in style with a hat-trick in his last game which earned the club promotion to the Allsvenskan as champions.
He arrived in Sussex in January 2018, initially linking up with the under-23s.
Ahead of the 2018-19 season, he saw action with the first team in pre-season friendlies, scoring the only goal of the game in a behind-closed-doors win over Nice at the French club’s training ground, going on for Murray on 34 minutes in a 1-1 draw with Swiss side St Gallen, replacing Solly March for the last 20 minutes of a 2-1 defeat to AFC Wimbledon and finally getting half an hour as sub for James Tilley in a 1-1 draw at Charlton.
That involvement led to him making his competitive first team debut in an inexperienced line-up that lost 1-0 at home to Southampton in the Carabao Cup. Fellow youngsters Ben Barclay and Will Collar also started and £17m (then) record signing Alireza Jahanbakhsh made his debut.
January 2019 was a memorable month for Gyökeres: three days after going on as a late sub for Anthony Knockaert in Albion’s home FA Cup third round 3-1 win over Bournemouth, he made his full international debut for Sweden in a 1-0 defeat to Finland and on 11 January scored a goal in his country’s 2-2 draw with Iceland.
Gyökeres was then featured in the matchday programme for the home FA Cup fourth round 0-0 draw with West Brom, when he was again a sub. He started the replay at The Hawthorns when Albion won 3-1.
In the following round, he got on as a sub when replacing Jurgen Locadia in Albion’s 2-1 win over Derby County, although he wasn’t involved in the quarter or semi-final matches.
But with that small amount of first team involvement, and having scored seven times in 19 games for the under-23s, Gyökeres had done enough for Albion to offer him a new three-year contract.
After signing he said: “I like this club and it feels like they believe in me.
“I want to do my best to prove that I can do good things here. I moved to another country with another language, so of course it’s been different compared to Sweden, but I’ve settled in well.
“It’s been good to train with the first team and travel with them to away games this season – it’s been a great experience and hopefully there will be more of that in the future.
“Next season I want to do better than I’ve done this year. Of course, I’d like to play in the first team, but I’ve got to work hard in pre-season, see what happens and what is best for me.”
Alas, what happened next was the departure of Hughton and the arrival of Graham Potter (now Gyökeres’ manager with the Swedish national side).
Instead of continuing his development at Brighton, he was sent on a season-long loan to St Pauli (Fabian Hurzeler’s former side) in the second tier of the Bundesliga at the start of the 2019-20 season. He scored seven goals in 28 appearances in Germany before returning to the Albion.
When Gyökeres played his first game under Potter, it was at an empty Amex because of the Covid-19 pandemic. He scored (above) playing as a lone striker as Brighton beat Portsmouth 4-0 in the Carabao Cup after which Potter said: “He has got attributes that are different. It’s not the easiest to play up front on his own. He kept going, he got his rewards at the end.”
Although he also played in the same competition’s 2-0 win over Preston North End and 3-0 defeat to Manchester United, the arrival of Danny Welbeck put another obstacle in the way of his first team opportunities and he was loaned out to Potter’s former club, Championship side Swansea City.
On making the move, Gyökeres admitted Potter and his assistants Billy Reid and Bjorn Hamberg had all recommended the move to south Wales. “I spoke to them a little bit as they had been here,” he told Swansea’s website. “They only had good things to say and that made me more comfortable to come here and play here.”
However, the loan was cut short after he’d made only three starts plus nine sub appearances and scored just one goal for Steve Cooper’s side, in an FA Cup third-round game at Stevenage.
He returned to Brighton but several things aligned that resulted in him joining Coventry City for the remainder of the season.
Chris Badlan, then head of recruitment for the Sky Blues, told ESPN: “Viktor is someone me and my chief scout at the time, Stuart Benthom, knew about when he was playing out in Sweden.
“As a scout, you need to know who the best 16/17-year-olds are who are playing on the continent. Brighton had signed him so we followed him in their under-23s, he then went to St. Pauli and we just kept tracking him like you always do.”
Coventry already had Albion’s Leo Østigård on loan and he convinced Gyökeres to join him and, as Badlan pointed out: “We had two or three centre-forwards injured at the same time so we could show him the opportunity. It all married up because he wanted to play and we needed a striker straight away.”
After scoring three times in 19 appearances, Gyökeres joined Coventry permanently in July 2021, reportedly for £1m, with manager Mark Robins saying: “Viktor is a talented striker with good power, pace and movement, and great potential. He showed a terrific attitude when he was with us on loan.
“He grew in confidence, and we hope that he will continue to show the same improvement and desire.”
According to Badlan, that summer Gyökeres spent his holiday time working hard on his conditioning. “He worked on his strengths. He was already a powerful runner but, all of a sudden, his shoulders, he got a bit more square, stronger in his core. It enabled him to roll defenders better.”
Badlan also reckoned much credit for the player’s development should go to former Manchester United forward Robins and his assistant Adi Viveash, who was used to nurturing talent having spent 10 years with Chelsea’s academy and under-23s.
“They polished the rough diamond that he was. They simplified his game. They worked with him in identifying his best attributes.
“Mark, being an ex-striker, helped Viktor understand his body, getting his positioning right, where to make runs, when to get the timing right.”
And it paid off big time. He began the season with nine goals in his first 11 games finished the season as top scorer with 18 goals and repeated the feat in 2022-23, finishing on 22 as City made it to the Championship play-off final but lost on penalties to Luton Town.
It was at Coventry where he began his distinctive goal celebration – covering half his face with interlocking fingers to resemble a mask a la Bane, the villain in 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises.
Reporter Andy Turner, who has covered Coventry for the Coventry Telegraph for more than 20 years, was asked his opinion of the player by several media outlets.
“In training, he was known to be a little bit grumpy, and that was largely due to the fact that he wanted everything done the right way,” said Turner. “He had very high standards and made demands on his teammates. He was quite a serious guy off the pitch.
“On the pitch, he worked hard and was just really strong and a willing runner off the ball, a real team player as well. He was at his best when he had the ball at his feet and was running at defenders doing his thing.”
Similar thoughts came from Josh Kerr, who played in the same Albion under-23 side as Gyökeres. Interviewed by Sky Sports, Kerr said: “He’s probably one of the most ruthless players that I’ve seen when he’s on the halfway line and he’s going to goal from the left.
“It was just the pace and power, sometimes teams couldn’t cope with that.”
Kerr highlighted the Swede’s willingness to put in a shift for the team, saying: “He would do it without you having to ask him – which is massive for certain teams or managers.
“He was just a good guy and that’s what you get from him. Works hard, does his job for the team.
“We obviously rated him highly then but we didn’t think he would kick on as much as he has, which has been quite incredible.”
The Telegraph’s Turner heaped praise on the player, saying: “He’s so strong on the ball, he protects the ball really well, he will take on two or three players in the box and will somehow get past them.
“He is a formidable striker. He is like an old school centre-forward in stature but he is very good with the ball at his feet. Technically he is good but he is very strong, it’s difficult to shrug him off the ball and he plays with a swagger.”
Maybe if Coventry had reached the Premier League in 2023, he would have stayed but plenty of clubs had noted his scoring prowess and, with a year left on his contract, he opted to move to Portugal to play for Sporting Lisbon under Ruben Amorim.
• See my pre-Arsenal blog post for what happened next.
