Is Hugo Ekitiké an Alexander Isak regen?

Sleek, slim and smooth. Those three adjectives became synonymous with our coverage of Hugo Ekitiké during the 2024/25 season.

And they are exactly the words we would use to describe Isak, too. The eye test suggests they are both competent dribblers, both excellent at finding space for shots in the box, both capable of holding up the ball, battling centre-backs and combining with teammates. So the SCOUTED hypothesis is that Hugo Ekitiké is very much an Alexander Isak regen. Now it’s time to test it.

To do so, I will be working with a dataset of 240 players tagged exclusively as a Forward by Stathead FBref and with at least 1,800 minutes across Europe’s Big Five Leagues since the start of the 2022/23 season. However, I have also included two bonus iterations of Ekitiké and Isak to see how representative the 2024/25 campaign was of their overall style while also building a subconscious awareness of team effect. All versions will be highlighted throughout:

• 2024/25 Alexander Isak (Newcastle United, Premier League)
• 2020/21 Alexander Isak (Real Sociedad, LaLiga)
• 2024/25 Hugo Ekitiké (Eintracht Frankfurt, Bundesliga)
• 2021/22 Hugo Ekitiké (Stade Reims, Ligue 1)

When trying to define players, I like to combine substance and style. Substance usually takes the form of per 90 output and I like to highlight the top 20% (80th percentile). Style refers to metrics such as Touches per Shot, Percentage of Touches that occur inside the Penalty Area or the Percentage of Touches that are Take-On Attempts. I highlight the average for these metrics to show how far a player moves away from the norm into a specific skill.

As I was putting together the visualisations for this piece, I realised that we would understand more about Ekitiké and Isak by highlighting a selection of other centre-forwards for comparison. By the end, you should have a solid answer to these two questions:

1. How similar are Ekitiké and Isak?
2. How does their style differ to their contemporaries?

In order to maximise insight for the second point, I have included Viktor Gyökeres’s data from his two seasons in Portugal; he is our Power Forward reference. To provide a Primeira Liga comparison - and what I suspect is a different profile - I have also combined Samu Agehowa’s Alavés numbers with his FC Porto output. The full list of centre-forwards you will see is as follows:

Hold your nose and put on your goggles, we’re about to dive in.