Andy Cole and Dwight Yorke barely knew each other when the latter arrived at Manchester United in the summer of 1998, but the partnership they forged became the stuff of legend. In training, they were often found working together, practising runs, interchanges, dummies and combinations. That season they scored 53 goals between them as the club won the treble. Yorke shared the Premier League Golden Boot with Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and Michael Owen on 18 goals. Cole finished one behind. The top 10 scorers in the league that season were all strikers.
But the training pitches and scoring charts paint a very different picture today. Finishing drills are infrequent, possession is paramount and the league’s leading scorers are more often wingers, No 10s or false 9s. Traditional centre-forwards are disappearing. Opta data shows the sharp decline in their influence. Two decades ago, strikers scored 41.6% of the Premier League’s goals – 387 of 931. This season, the figure stands at 25.9% – 291 of 845.
Standout individual striker performances have dwindled, too. Between 2007 and 2012, four out of five seasons featured 10 or more hat-tricks by centre-forwards. In the past nine seasons, that threshold has been passed once.
Nowhere is the shrinking pool of strikers more evident than in the England squad. Beyond Harry Kane – who turns 33 shortly after the World Cup – the options are limited and unconvincing. Dominic Solanke, with three league goals in an injury-hit season, and Dominic Calvert-Lewin, with 10, were given a chance in Thomas Tuchel’s final squad before the World Cup. Neither impressed. Ollie Watkins is next in line and has nine league goals.
Without Kane in England’s recent friendlies, England scored once against Uruguay – thanks to a defender – and drew a blank against Japan. Their eight shots on target in the two games flattered the performances.
Since his debut, in 2015, Kane has contributed 78 goals and 19 assists, making him involved in 32% of England’s goals. If he is injured before the World Cup, England are in trouble. When he retires, the succession plan looks alarmingly thin.
Where have all the No 9s gone? Why has the striker become a dying breed? Can anything be done to arrest the decline?
“It’s no longer a sexy position,” says Emile Heskey, a traditional centre-forward who won 62 England caps. He grew up watching strikers such as Cyrille Regis and Gary Lineker. “Now it’s possession-based, the striker generally doesn’t get involved in play. The striker’s job, especially in the buildup, is to keep the pitch as long as possible to create space for the No 10 or the two 8s or the two 10s or the wingers.”
The redefinition of the No 9 role can be traced, in part, to José Mourinho’s arrival at Chelsea in 2004 and his success with a solitary striker in a 4-2-3-1. Pep Guardiola went further, reimagining football without a striker altogether. At Barcelona he created majestic football with Lionel Messi as a false 9: a central forward who drops deeper.
On the way to the 2020-21 Champions League final, Guardiola even deployed two false 9s for Manchester City. Erling Haaland remains the modern outlier clinging to a bygone era, but even he has adapted in recent seasons, bending to Guardiola’s will.
The shift has changed the entire landscape of training and youth teams. René Meulensteen recalls doing 15-30 minutes of finishing work with strikers every day during his time under Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United from 2007-2013. Now, he says, beyond goalkeeping, training has become far more generalised. More matches at elite level and a greater emphasis on strength and conditioning have squeezed time on training pitches, where possession is prioritised.
Strikers “don’t get developed, it’s as simple as that”, Meulensteen told the Sacked podcast. “Everybody does the same thing. There needs to be much more specialist training.”
When Kane does retire, is anyone coming through to replace him? Even the academies have changed the way they shape the next generation. Youth teams tend to mirror the first-team formation often now a fixed system decided by executives – so that any academy graduate is, in theory, a ready fit.
“A lot of formations are losing that partnership,” says Dean Whitehouse, who worked in Manchester United’s academy for 23 years with players including Marcus Rashford and Scott McTominay. “They’re not putting in early balls from crosses and, to a certain degree, this tactical overload has started to affect that impromptu, natural strike partnerships you’d get when you had a pair or played full-throttle attacking football.
“Is it that we’re keeping the ball for keeping the ball’s sake and we’ve lost that vertical thrust the team had? For me, if you’re not working on No 9s with back to goal, working as a pair, opposite runs, getting the ball in early and making support runs early, the buildup is too sanitised, you’re not going to create these real No 9 predators. I think that’s a problem.”
There is, however, belief the No 9 hasn’t had its day just yet, despite the present predicament. We have Gareth Southgate to thank for the abundance of technically gifted No 10s nobody can fit into the England team. In 2011, as the Football Association’s head of youth development, he pushed for smaller-sided games at youth level. Southgate recognised that smaller, more technical players were being forced out of Sunday football by bigger, more physical players suited to 11-a-side.
At the time he suggested the country “would have probably overlooked” the next Xaxi, Iniesta or Messi. Which suggests that, when the FA and Premier League academies align, anything is possible.
If a first-team manager starts winning trophies with a lethal strike partnership, the demand will return. “As soon as people start playing with a paired strike force and success comes from that then everybody wants to jump on board,” Whitehouse says. “When they do, they think: how can we make this better? Let’s design practices that are going to improve these players. Then before you know it, we’ll have an abundance of No 9s again.”
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