On the last Sunday of July, at the Emirates, Viktor Gyökeres scored a second-half penalty in a game Arsenal lost 3-2 to Borussia Dortmund. It was the Emirates Cup, a friendly, the sort of fixture that means nothing and gets reported as though it might mean everything. Afterwards he said he felt "much, much better" physically than he had a year earlier, when he'd arrived from Sporting Lisbon still adjusting to a different climate and a different weight room. Nobody asked him, in that press conference, whether he felt any clearer about what Arsenal actually wanted him to do. Nobody had to. The question has been open since the day he signed, and it is still open now.

The signing itself, in the summer of 2025, came with the usual paperwork of certainty. Mikel Arteta called him "a quick and powerful presence up front" with "intelligent movement in the box." Andrea Berta, the sporting director, went further: Gyökeres was "a perfect fit for our vision." Vision is a useful word for a press release because it commits you to nothing specific. Ninety-seven goals in a hundred and two games for Sporting had bought him a five-year deal worth £64 million, and the vision, whatever it was, would presumably reveal itself once the season started.

What the season actually delivered was stranger than either the hype or the backlash. Gyökeres started twenty-six of Arsenal's thirty-six league games, which is not what you buy a record centre-forward for. He finished with twenty-one goals in fifty-five appearances across all competitions, in a campaign that ended with Arsenal's first league title in twenty-two years and a Champions League final. That is not the record of a misfit. It is the record of a very good player used, for large stretches, as a squad rotation rather than a plan — which is a different problem, and a more interesting one, than the one currently being argued about on the podcasts.

The case for calling him a square peg is not stupid, and it deserves stating properly rather than waved off. The profile the Athletic ran on him before he'd kicked a ball in England was clear enough: a forward who wants to go direct, who peels into wide channels and carries the ball through opposition lines, who is "not an archetypal penalty-box poacher" and has no great appetite for waiting on crosses. Arteta himself described him as someone who wants to "go directly to goal," "totally ruthless," a player built on pace and physicality rather than the patient combination play Arsenal's front line is supposed to specialise in. Ask that player to interchange fluidly across three positions, to drop into pockets and link the way Arteta's other forwards do, and you are asking him to unlearn the very qualities that got him signed. Versatility, in this reading, is a demand made on a hammer that it also learn to be a screwdriver.

Here is where the argument turns, and it turns on Arsenal's own recent history rather than on sentiment about Gyökeres. For several seasons the club's most reliable failure has not been creating chances but converting territorial dominance into anything resembling danger — the ball circulating around the edge of a low block, patient and toothless, while a well-organised defence simply declines to be broken down by patience alone. That is precisely the situation Gyökeres' directness was bought to solve: quick, aggressive shot-taking, the willingness to attack space rather than wait for it to open, a threat on second balls that Arsenal have lacked in open, uncomplicated terms since the Giroud years. None of that requires him to be versatile. It requires Arsenal to build two or three repeatable patterns around what he already does — service into the channel, a runner rather than a target, a striker who finishes rather than facilitates — and then to trust those patterns even in matches where the fashionable thing is fluid rotation.

Arsenal have been here before, though not often enough to have learned the lesson properly. Francis Jeffers arrived from Everton in the summer of 2001 as "the fox in the box," a phrase that promised a specific job and delivered, over four years, almost no service designed to let him do it. He was not lacking in talent so much as lacking in definition; the club never quite decided what he was for, and so he became, gradually and unfairly, a name people use as shorthand for wasted money rather than a player who was simply never given the pattern his game required. The lesson from 2001 was never that big-money forwards can't adapt to English football. It was that clubs sometimes buy a specific tool and then spend three years trying to use it as a different one.

Gyökeres is not Jeffers, and the comparison should not be pushed further than the single point it makes. He arrives with a bigger reputation, a heavier price tag, and — crucially — a title medal already earned in a season where his role was frequently ambiguous. That last fact cuts against the doom-laden version of this argument as much as it supports the milder one. He has already shown he can produce something under uncertainty. What remains unproven, five games into his second Premier League season, is whether Arteta intends to keep asking him to be several different players at once, or whether the club that called him a perfect fit for its vision is finally ready to write that vision down.