Sporting CP playmaker Pedro Gonçalves warned that it took time for the whole team to adjust to Viktor Gyökeres’s preferred style of play which didn’t suit an approach based around short passing—precisely the system that Mikel Arteta has painstakingly implemented at Arsenal over the last half-decade.
Gyökeres joined Sporting in 2023 after spending the previous three years in the Championship. England’s second tier had belatedly unearthed the forward’s prolific potential, but there wasn’t a great deal of refinement around his game. Goals were all that mattered. As his Coventry City manager Mark Robins once reflected: “If he didn’t score after a game he’d be in a foul mood.”
