Pérez is Not What Tottenham Need

An otherwise successful summer transfer window for Tottenham threatened to become marred by the absurd saga surrounding the club’s pursuit of West Brom’s Saido Berahino in the dying days of August.

The club’s failure to convince West Brom to part with their promising young striker seemed, at first, to be a damning indictment of Daniel Levy’s level of influence at the club. Tottenham, it was said, desperately needed a striker to backup Harry Kane, and therefore one should be acquired regardless of price. Levy’s characteristic brinksmanship and haggling sunk the club’s chances of getting Kane the support he needed.

Thankfully, with just over a third of the season complete, most have forgotten how real that striker crisis felt in the summer. Kane has come good on the promises he made last season, scoring seven goals in his last five Premier League appearances. Heung-min Son, acquired the week before the Berahino deal fell through, has suggested he’d be more than capable of filling for Kane as needed. The Tottenham fanbase’s demands for a new striker have thus decreased to not much more than a dull roar.

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It’s still there though, and with some justification. Even if Kane and Son are enough for the starting XI, there’s still a surfeit of options coming up through Tottenham’s academy. Shaq Coulthirst and Shayon Harrison are encouraging but still years away from first team action, assuming they even make it that far. Tottenham need legitimate competition for Kane as well as a permanent solution should the England striker go down or leave the club.

That striker would have to fall into a narrow band of qualifications. Young, between 19 and 22, but with a good deal of top flight experience and the ability to feature in multiple phases of play. Berahino fits that mold, of course. Basel’s Breel Embolo has justifiably been given a lot of attention as he is beyond promising while also checking off these boxes.

There’s one other option that has generated a lot of noise since first being linked with the club in the late summer: Newcastle’s Ayoze Pérez.

At first glance, he looks a perfect fit. He only turned 22 in the summer. He’s played plenty of Premier League football since arriving at Newcastle prior to last season from Spanish second division side Tenerife. His game is oriented around playing deep, retrieving the ball and pressing play forward. In short, Pérez vaguely fits the profile of a modern Tottenham player.

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His stats and style read almost exactly like those of Heung-min Son – a deep-lying forward capable of playing on his own or with a proper center forward in front of him – except in one crucial regard. For a player that features in the striker role, his production rate is preposterously low. With ten goals in 3,243 minutes on the pitch, Pérez is scoring at a rate of one goal every 324.3 minutes, or once every 3.6 complete games. Compared with Kane – one goal every 131 minutes – that’s a significant downgrade.

Kane, to be fair, was utterly prolific last season. Even compared to Berahino, though, Pérez comes up short. The West Brom striker has averaged one goal every 213 minutes since the beginning of last season.

Pérez appears to pay heavily for his participation in build up play. It keeps him far from goal and, at least at Newcastle, he lacks the means to get back into dangerous positions. His meager shot rate of 1.7 per game since his arrival in the northeast of England tells that story completely.

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It’s not that dropping deep and scoring goals are mutually exclusively roles for a striker to play. Son does everything that Pérez does while also managing to get off 2.7 shots per game. That doesn’t seem like a tremendous difference, but it adds up over the course of a season.

In short, Pérez could be a red herring. It’s possible he improves with more playing time – or with a better team than relegation locks Newcastle – but Tottenham would do better to find a striker that shows signs of being a more complete package. Who that will be is hard to say, but it’s safe to guess that it won’t be Pérez.