Crystal Palace flop left in 2020, now he’s outscoring Nketiah by a mile

Oliver Glasner took over as manager of Crystal Palace for his first full season, and the team had a very active summer.

Michael Olise’s departure from Palace to join Bayern Munich was actually one of the greatest transactions made this summer.

But according to Fabrizio Romano, Palace was able to bring in Eddie Nketiah, an Arsenal striker, for a set sum of £25 million plus £5 million in add-ons.

Nketiah played 1,393 minutes in 37 games in all competitions for Arsenal last season, notching three assists and six goals.

Seeing how he performs at Selhurst Park will be interesting for someone who was mainly limited to substitute appearances in north London.

But we’ll see if he proves to be a stronger candidate than Alexander Sorloth.

The record of Alexander Sorloth at Palace
For an estimated £9 million, Sorloth left Midtjylland to join Crystal Palace back in 2018. The Norway international, who has made 20 appearances with the Eagles, never quite found success there.

After that, the striker had a string of loan stints, the most notable of which was to Gent, where he made 22 appearances, tallying three assists and five goals.

There was also a loan move, this time to the Turkish club Trabzonspor, where he made 49 appearances, contributing 11 assists and 33 goals.

Ultimately, in 2020, Sorloth was sold by Crystal Palace to RB Leipzig for an estimated £16.8 million, allowing the club to profit from the forward even though his time there was unsuccessful.

After leaving the capital of England, Sorloth played for RB Leipzig for three years, although he never really made an impact there. In 38 games, he made six goals and three assists.

However, it was his two seasons of loan play with Real Sociedad—during which he scored 24 goals in 90 games and contributed five assists—that really got things going.

After moving permanently from Leipzig to Villarreal in 2023, where he was enjoying his time in Spain, Sorloth had his greatest season since his loan stint at Trabzonspor in 2019. The 28-year-old made 41 appearances for Villarreal in the 2023–24 campaign, tallying 26 goals and dishing out six assists.

At 28, Sorloth is in the peak of his career, averaging 0.80 goals per 90 possessions and a 0.28 shots-to-goal ratio. These are the measurements of a world-class goal scorer, especially when you consider that he only takes 2.88 shots per 90 possessions, compared to Nketiah’s 3.14 shots per 90 possessions.

At six feet four, Sorloth is an aerial beast who wins 2.80 aerials per ninety. He is also a top-tier box danger who can score headers from crosses and cause problems for opponents in the penalty area.

Sorloth’s goal-scoring ability has won him a major transfer, as Atlético Madrid pays £29 million to get the Norway striker. Maybe the kind of journey Sorloth needed to take in order to achieve this degree of accomplishment, or maybe one that Palace will regret looking back on.