The £55m bold forward signing who could bring Aston Villa’s struggling attack to life
Aston Villa are reportedly interested in signing a new striker - but would he put some spark back into their attack?
While there are many factors behind Aston Villa’s agonising narrow failure to qualify for the Champions League, one of the biggest problems that Unai Emery faced last season was simple – his team wasn’t scoring as many goals as before.
When they finished fourth in 2023/24, Villa racked up 76 league goals. Last season, that number plummeted to just 58, and although that followed a broader trend within the league which saw fewer goals right across the board, it was still the fewest of any team that finished in the top half of the Premier League table.
Villa have an excellent centre-forward in Ollie Watkins, but he may need more support if Villa are to return to the top four in the near future – and new transfer rumours suggest that they are acutely aware of the need for some fresh firepower…
The £55m forward that Aston Villa could sign this summer
A slew of media outlets reported on Wednesday that Aston Villa have approached Porto ahead of a potential deal for striker Samu Agehowa, who scored 25 goals in his first and perhaps last season in Portugal. Agehowa – the forward formerly known as Samu Omorodion before changing his preferred name for family reasons – came close to joining Chelsea from Atlético Madrid in the summer of 2024 for a fee of over £35m, but failed a medical and moved to Porto instead. A year on, he could now finally make his move to the Premier League.
He’ll likely cost a little more this time around. The twice-capped Spain international lived up to the building hype in Portugal, scoring 19 league goals along with half a dozen more in the Europea League, and is now valued by his side at a hefty £55m. Goals against Inter Miami and Al Ahly followed in this summer’s Club World Cup won’t have done anything to push his price tag down.
Villa have been linked with Agehowa persistently since the £64m departure of Jhon Durán in January, and now appear to be making a move to turn the 21-year-old into a belated replacement – and to give Watkins the able deputy he has lacked since Durán left.
Other sides have been suggested as possible destinations for Agehowa, including Newcastle United, but none are reported to have made contact with Porto and there are no imminent signs that Villa will have strong competition if they do decide to make a bid. Newcastle, as it stands, are focused on their efforts to sign Benjamin Šeško.
The only obvious stumbling block would be the fee, but Villa are in a relatively healthy PSR position after the substantial losses incurred during the 2022/23 season cleared from the rolling three-year period. Although Villa were forced to sell their women’s team to their owners’ holding company to dodge a potential points deduction last month, they should be in relatively healthy financial condition going forward so long as they remain sensible.
The door, then, seems to be open for Villa to complete a first significant move of the summer transfer window – and Agehowa could well score the goals they lacked last season.
Why Samu Agehowa could reinvigorate Aston Villa’s attack
Agehowa’s role, should he sign for Villa, would likely mirror that of Durán’s in many ways, but there are key differences between the two strikers’ playing styles. Agehowa is a truly traditional centre-forward, one who tries to play as close to the penalty spot as possible and who seldom looks to drop into deeper areas to pick up possession or to attack the channels.
That’s largely because he has a skill-set that is, in many ways, somewhat limited. He isn’t a particularly impressive ball-carrier and doesn’t have the touch to beat defenders one-on-one, beating his man less than a third of the time that he attempted it in the Primeira Liga last season. Nor does he have the passing range or creativity to be the kind of forward who can tee up his colleagues with quick interchanges or sharp passes. Agheowa is a striker, and his sole standout quality is that he scores goals.
There is little question that the Spaniard is a superb finisher – his 19 league goals last season came from just over 14xG’s worth of chances (including four penalty kicks) and he scored at the equivalent rate of three goals every four full matches. Few forwards in the Premier League hit the back of the net at a rate like that.
He’s got both the physical power and turn of pace and the knack for peeling off a marker at the last moment to get into good scoring positions and to finish chances off – all he needs is service. He won’t provide it for others and nor can he be expected to carve chances out for himself, but will feast on quality deliveries from those around him.
That does suggest that signing Agehowa alone won’t fix all of Villa’s scoring problems. Their issue last season was less one of converting chances than it was of creating them. They were in the bottom half of the Premier League table in terms of chance creation and total number of attempts on goal, finishing what they made well but not making quite enough.
There is also an understandable concern that signing Agehowa would simply create a repeat of the quandary that was created by having both Watkins and Durán in a squad which was only designed to have one striker. Durán could, at least, operate in a slightly deeper role than required – asking Agehowa to do the same would be asking him to play against both type and his natural qualities as a player.
Still, if Emery can find ways to generate more chances with the players available, then all of the evidence suggests that Agehowa will score plenty of goals – and that kind of extra firepower could easily be the difference between qualifying for the Champions League and another narrow miss.