Premier League
Bundesliga
Published on Aug, 01 2024
At 31 years old, Niclas Fullkrug’s journey to the Premier League has been a long time coming but this is someone capable of becoming a fan-favourite quickly. West Ham’s move for the Borussia Dortmund striker will bring a German cult hero to English football.
Since becoming Germany's oldest debutant in a generation in 2022, he has scored 13 goals for his country, the majority of those coming as a substitute. It is a plan B already so tried and trusted that perhaps it would be more accurate just to call it the plan.
Even amid the adulation, there has been a vague sense of a man damned with faint praise. Hansi Flick, then Germany's head coach, noted that his heart was in the right place. Successor Julian Nagelsmann wondered if he might be better off the bench.
But he won over a nation. Now he hopes to do the same at West Ham. They like a mercurial talent in east London but there is a love too for the workhorse, the man who looks like he has taken the super serum and swaggered straight from stand to pitch.
One assumes the West Ham fans would be more enthused about this acquisition were Fullkrug five years younger. They could have signed him for less then, too. But could they have signed a 26-year-old striker able to do what he can now do? That is less clear.
Fullkrug arrives at the high point of his career, not only having scored twice at a second consecutive international tournament but having come within inches of being the hero in the Champions League final at Wembley. Only the post denied him the opening goal.
Not bad for someone who was still playing in Germany's second tier at the age of 29 and to this day has made more appearances outside of the country's top division than in it. It all adds to the appeal, the image of a man who made it through sheer force of will.
Why has he blossomed so late? Speaking to Gerhard Zuber about this after Fullkrug's international breakthrough, he had his theories. His old sporting director at Hannover believes fatherhood changed him. "He is calmer and more relaxed," he told Sky Sports.
Maybe he just needed someone to believe in him. At Hannover, Fullkrug had not even been in a team struggling to find their way out of the second tier. Zuber had to speak to the coach to encourage a change. "If you show confidence in him then he pays it back."
Promotion followed but injuries hampered him before and after his move to Werder Bremen. "That was his big problem. He could not play a season without injury." In three seasons, from 2018 to 2021, what might have been his peak, he missed 61 matches.
The anterior cruciate ligament injury that he suffered in 2019 might well have been the end of it. And Fullkrug would not have figured on those lists of wasted talents, careers unfulfilled. Few would have anticipated that there was any great achievement to fulfil.
What has followed has been astonishing. His 16-goal season with newly-promoted Bremen stunned Germany, and he showed at Dortmund that he had a part to play in a superior side too. Most importantly, those injury problems have been left in the past.
"This is his main secret. When he is fit, he is one of the best around. Now he is doing that, but in the past, he had small injuries and when you are not playing every game you are not in the best shape. Momentum is the biggest advantage for him now.
"He is feeling good and you can see that with his shooting. That is very helpful. If you score goals then it gives you confidence and if you have confidence then you score goals. He has amazing physicality and he is doing everything he can to be in shape now."
Zuber rates him as an excellent one-on-one finisher and describes him as "one of the best in Europe" with his head. Football may have evolved but a player who can make the difference in the box will never go out of fashion. "Every team needs a player like him."
Do not be totally seduced by the caricature of the affable German just happy to be there either. At Bremen, he was once suspended after an outburst. "Normally you would kick him out after what he said in that training session. Sometimes he is very emotional."
But the club knew by that point that he was a difference maker. "They gave him a second chance and he took it." Outspoken, he may have been, but there was always that work ethic, even in his Hannover days. "He does extra training sessions, always shooting."
It helps to explain the improvement in him. This apparently uncomplicated striker has continued to add new elements to his game. There is a canniness to him and the skills that were honed in the lower leagues are now coupled with an increased awareness.
Last season for Borussia Dortmund, there were 12 Bundesliga goals but there were also eight assists from open play - meaning he ranked as the sixth most creative player in the competition. He was Dortmund's attacking pivot, the player around whom it was built.
Fullkrug ranked sixth for successful flick-ons and fourth for lay-off passes, the sort of statistics that identify him as someone capable of bringing others into play. West Ham have quality players who will see more of the ball in good areas thanks to Fullkrug.
West Ham sporting director Tim Steidten knows him well, while Julen Lopetegui understands the value of a target man. He had Luuk de Jong at Sevilla, the Dutch striker scoring twice in the first half of the club's Europa League final win over Inter in 2020.
That should assuage some of the concerns among supporters who have seen Sebastien Haller and Gianluca Scamacca pass through in recent years without making too much of a mark, despite being successful both before and after their time in a West Ham shirt.
But in more ways than one, Fullkrug is just different.
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