Nicolas Jackson had gone 10 games without scoring for Villarreal last season when their head coach Unai Emery backed him in a way that expressed both certainty and doubt.
“He is in a process,” Emery, now in charge of Aston Villa, said. “I don’t know if he will ever score the number of chances he generates, but I’m sure the day he starts scoring them, his numbers will be talked about. I wish it was now. But he is in a process and he must continue to work.”
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Emery was wrong about one thing: above all, it is when a centre-forward isn’t scoring that his numbers are talked about. By the start of April this year, Jackson had scored just two goals in 24 La Liga appearances for Villarreal (eight starts) having seen a January move to Premier League relegation candidates Bournemouth fall through due to issues with his medical.
Then it clicked.
Jackson came on against Real Sociedad and scored a well-taken goal, cutting inside onto his right foot in what has become a signature move, and the floodgates opened. He scored 10 goals in his final 11 appearances for Villarreal, earning La Liga’s player of the month award for May and, more significantly, a €35million (£30.4m;$37.8m) move to Chelsea to become the focal point of a new-look forward line.
And so began another process, this time under far greater scrutiny.
His first nine Premier League appearances brought glimpses of his abundant talent but saw him score just two goals. Carrying the goalscoring burden in a struggling, inexperienced team looked like a huge ask of a player who, seven months earlier, had just two top-flight goals to his name.
“I believe in him,” Chelsea coach Mauricio Pochettino said after Jackson was criticised for his performance in the home defeat against Brentford on October 28. “The only thing we need to do is give him time.”
Nine days later, Jackson scored a hat-trick in Monday’s 4-1 win at Tottenham Hotspur.
That sounds like the most dramatic, encouraging breakthrough imaginable, but still there was criticism relating to the timing of his runs when Chelsea were struggling to find a way past Spurs’ nine players, and remarkably high defensive line, after the dismissals of defenders Cristian Romero and Destiny Udogie. Even when he raced clear to score his third goal, seven minutes into stoppage time and four minutes after getting his second, he looked unsure of himself, almost apologetic, until he was halfway past goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario.
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Perhaps the floodgates will open for him now, like they did late last season at Villarreal. But at 22, with only 24 top-flight starts to his name, Jackson remains a “project”, his finesse in some areas belied by some frayed edges to his game.
It all looks rather new to him and, when you consider that, two seasons ago, he scored just five goals in 25 appearances for Villarreal’s B team in Spain’s third tier, it is hardly surprising if the transition is not entirely smooth.
This time last season, Rasmus Hojlund had scored just one goal for Atalanta.
He had only arrived in the final days of August, signed for €17million after a spectacular start to the campaign for Austrian club Sturm Graz brought comparisons with Erling Haaland. But it was a slow start to life in Serie A. He was in and out of Atalanta’s line-up, only starting four out of a possible 13 league games before the season was put on hold in the middle of November for the playing of the World Cup in Qatar.
As with Jackson, the goals came later and in a flurry: a barren spell of one in his first 11 Serie A appearances followed by a purple patch of eight in his 21 games after the winter break.
Still, he was in and out of the starting line-up, but at times his performance level was spectacular. Atalanta coach Gian Piero Gasperini said: “He has the characteristics to become one of the strongest strikers in the world. Among the young emerging players in his role, if not the best, he is among the best in Europe.”
Like Jackson, he was soon on the move.
Manchester United agreed to pay a guaranteed €75million to Atalanta, with the possibility of a further €10m in add-ons if certain performance-related clauses are triggered. Again, it seemed an extraordinary show of faith — not just the size of the fee but the fact he was being signed to fill an urgent vacancy at centre-forward for one of the biggest clubs in world football when, barely six months earlier, he was still trying to find his feet at Atalanta.
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And, like Jackson, he has had a very challenging start to life in England. More challenging than his Chelsea counterpart, in fact.
Hojlund, who doesn’t turn 21 until February, has scored three times in the Champions League — once away to Bayern Munich, twice at home against Galatasaray — but his eight Premier League appearances, seven in the starting line-up, have not yielded a single goal.
Both players have shown glimpses of their vast potential — Jackson arguably more so on his debut against Liverpool in August than when scoring three times against Tottenham this week. Both have also, at times, looked as unpolished as you would expect such relatively unproven players to look.
And, even in their most difficult moments, both would be entitled to feel their struggles have been a symptom of a wider dysfunction rather than a cause.
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In many ways, that is the point.
Here we have two big, wealthy, powerful clubs, who have spent on such a huge scale in recent years (and in Chelsea’s case even more so in the first year under the ownership of Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital) but are commonly accused of doing so without a clear vision.
For all the money both clubs have spent, they find themselves alarmingly short of proven quality and goal threat in attack.
Chelsea averaged just a goal a game in the Premier League last season. This season has brought an improvement (1.55 goals per game) but all but six of their 17 goals have come in just three matches — against promoted sides Luton Town and Burnley and now a depleted Tottenham. Consistency remains an issue.
United averaged 1.53 goals per game in the Premier League last season, considerably lower than any other team in the final top six, and are scoring at a rate of 1.09 after 11 matches of this one. It isn’t just Hojlund who has found it tough going. Marcus Rashford, Alejandro Garnacho, Jadon Sancho, Antony and Hojlund have just one Premier League goal between them.
It isn’t just a question of whether the players are good enough or mature enough. Stamford Bridge and Old Trafford have been graveyards for creative and attacking talent in recent years.
If you were backing a young winger or centre-forward to hit the ground running in the Premier League in 2023, you probably wouldn’t propose Chelsea or United as the ideal stage. Young attacking talent tends to flourish in teams that play expansive football in a warm, positive, nurturing yet inspiring environment — something Pochettino has spoken about the need to provide for Jackson and others at Chelsea.
It is a long time since United, in particular, could claim to offer that.
On Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football show, the former Chelsea, Liverpool and England forward Daniel Sturridge analysed Jackson in depth. Looking at a couple of chances he missed earlier in the season, Sturridge said he felt the Senegalese forward didn’t have “a particular finish that he’s trying to replicate”.
Sturridge talked viewers through various different types of finish, and said they need to be practised over and over because “it’s hard all of a sudden to pick them up out of nowhere”.
That applies to making the right runs too.
At his sharpest this season, such as in that debut against Liverpool, it is the intelligent, direct, piercing runs that have defined Jackson’s threat. At times against Tottenham on Monday, he mistimed his runs, either going too early or holding back too long as if wary of getting it wrong.
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Then again, there was a moment early in the second half when he made the perfect run in the inside-left channel, only for Raheem Sterling, on the counter-attack, to play the ball to the right despite Jackson looking a far better bet. Sometimes it is about a player’s confidence and sometimes it is about having the confidence of his team-mates. A hat-trick in a London derby away to Tottenham should help in both regards.
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It is interesting to analyse Jackson’s goals in the context of game state.
Four of his first five in the Premier League have come when Chelsea were already leading: their third in a 3-0 win over Luton; their fourth in a 4-1 victory at Burnley; their third and fourth in that 4-1 defeat of Tottenham. He has looked more assured in the rare moments when, in terms of game state, the pressure has been off Chelsea.
Hojlund can claim not even to have had that small comfort.
United have not led by two goals all season in the Premier League. Indeed they have barely led at all, with all but one of their six league wins having been secured in the closing stages. Of the 572 minutes he has played in the competition, his team have led for just 51. Every game has been anxious. Almost every attack looks fraught rather than fluent.
Jackson’s expected goals (xG) total, reflecting the quality of his scoring chances, is rated at 7.1 (the third highest in the Premier League behind Haaland and Mohamed Salah) as opposed to Hojlund’s 1.4 (71st in the division). Jackson’s xG per 90 minutes played is 0.84. Hojlund’s is 0.21, which is the type of figure you might expect for the centre-forward at a relegation-threatened team rather than Manchester United.
Often in these situations, you might ask whether the player is a big part of the problem — failing to make the right runs, not willing enough to gamble by attacking the danger area. Nobody can accuse Hojlund of that. If a single image of him comes to mind this season, it is of him charging down the middle of the pitch at a rate of knots in anticipation of a cross… which doesn’t come.
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On the rare occasions the service has been there, as when Rashford picked him out at speed in the Champions League game against Galatasaray, Hojlund has obliged.
During the segment on Sky Sports, Sturridge highlighted two incidents in recent United games when Hojlund made the perfect run, only for a team-mate to opt to shoot from a much tighter angle rather than pass.
One came at home to Brighton & Hove Albion in September when Rashford fired into the side-netting with his weaker foot (xG for that chance: 0.05) after Hojlund had got ahead of his marker in the middle. The other came at Fulham on Saturday when Garnacho shot from a narrow angle (xG: 0.06) although his Danish team-mate’s pace had taken him clear of the home side’s Tim Ream in a central position.
“He has great potential,” Sturridge said of Hojlund. “He makes good runs. I just think he’s maybe not getting as many opportunities as he would like. (Looking at the Garnacho incident at Fulham) Clearly, the ball isn’t great. I don’t think (Hojlund) can do much more there. He has to have those conversations, let (his team-mates) know what he likes and make them understand, ‘This is what I like. When you pick the ball up there, I’m going to make this run. Feed me in’.”
Pitch-side microphones at Fulham appeared to pick up Hojlund yelling in frustration at Garnacho’s failure to do that. In Garnacho’s defence, he is even younger at 19. For a winger, as for a centre-forward, erratic decision-making and end-product can be excused when a player is learning on the job.
It is no coincidence that both Chelsea and United ended up signing such young, unproven centre-forwards in the summer. Both had obvious vacancies, but neither club has been notable for its long-term strategic planning in recent years.
It was a case of seeing what was out there and, with Harry Kane off limits as he swapped Spurs for Bayern Munich, Ivan Toney of Brentford serving a long-term suspension and Napoli’s Victor Osimhen deemed too expensive, there wasn’t much.
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The centre-forward has become an endangered species as football trends have evolved over the past decade.
Haaland’s spectacular impact at Manchester City last season might have sparked talk of a renaissance, but there are not many Haalands out there. It is partly the absence of proven alternatives that led Chelsea and United to go for Jackson and Hojlund respectively — and Liverpool to sign a 22-year-old Darwin Nunez a year earlier after a breakthrough second season with Benfica in Portugal — in the hope that a rough diamond can be polished into something precious.
Top-class centre-forwards are now so scarce — and so expensive in the case of Osimhen — that clubs even some of the biggest clubs are finding themselves gambling on younger, less proven players.
It is almost impossible to imagine in the past that a club of Chelsea’s or United’s size, ambition and spending power would have committed such sums based on such a limited show of goalscoring prowess.
Ruud van Nistelrooy had two hugely prolific seasons at PSV Eindhoven in the Netherlands before United agreed to break the British transfer record to sign him in 2001. Didier Drogba seemed something of a punt for Chelsea in summer 2004 despite scoring 32 goals in all competitions for Marseille the previous season.
Fernando Torres had scored 91 goals in all competitions for Atletico Madrid by the summer of 2007 but was still perceived by many as a risky investment for Liverpool, with rival clubs not fully convinced he would be up to the physical rigours of English football.
Chelsea and United fans will hope that, in time, Jackson and Hojlund can have the kind of influence those centre-forwards had in the Premier League. But there can be no guarantees about these or any other “project” players when the clubs in question don’t seem to have worked out precisely what their “project” is.
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Sturridge spoke up for both Jackson and Hojlund in his pre-match analysis on Monday and sounded particularly pleased for the latter after his hat-trick. But tellingly, when asked whether they represent the answer for the clubs who have signed them, he said: “I can’t answer that.”
Nobody can yet. Nobody can say Jackson has cracked it after scoring three times at Tottenham and nobody can say Hojlund is a write-off — or anything close to it — after eight Premier League games without a goal.
Even now, more than a year into his Liverpool career, it is best to avoid definitive pronouncements about Nunez, who can lurch between extremes not just from week to the next but from one moment to the next. And if he can be excused some rougher edges to his game at the age of 24, then Jackson, 22, and Hojlund, 20, can certainly be indulged in the challenging moments.
Pochettino’s faith in Jackson received some welcome payback on Monday night. Even on a frustrating afternoon at Fulham on Saturday, Hojlund was far from the weakest link in United’s forward line.
To borrow Emery’s phrase, both players are in a process. Nobody can say with any certainty where that process will lead them.
It just seems remarkable that, at such early stages in their development, it has taken them to starting roles at two clubs where the goalscoring burden seems to weigh so heavily.
These are two teams who do not look particularly well equipped to carry a young centre-forward through difficult periods.
If anything, the onus will be on the young centre-forward to carry their team-mates.
And that is a lot to ask.
(Top photos: Getty Images)