The summer transfer window race for your club’s next big striker promises to be an exciting one.

Multiple big clubs seem to be looking for their next No. 9 (Arsenal, Liverpool, maybe even Real Madrid?) and there’s no shortage of intriguing names to target. Naturally, guys like Alexander Isak, Victor Osimhen and Viktor Gyökeres will attract the most attention after each posted 20-plus goal seasons and are firmly in that 25-to-26 years-old range where it feels like this might be their moment to make a big move.

But the pool doesn’t end there, as there are some younger strikers who may not be as much of a finished product but have sky-high potential. And RB Leipzig’s Benjamin Šeško deserves plenty of consideration among that group. 

For obsessive wonderkid followers such as myself, it feels like Šeško has been around for a while, but even though he has already played four full seasons of top-flight football, Šeško is still just 21 years old. The nearly 6-foot-5 Slovenian came up through the Red Bull academy system in Austria — scoring 29 goals in 79 games for the Red Bull Salzburg before moving to the company’s East German outpost.

Because he’s a tall European striker who broke out at Red Bull Salzburg, Šeško naturally received some early comparisons to Manchester City striker Erling Haaland, who famously played for Salzburg before eventually moving to City, where he scored 52 goals in all competitions in his first season and has been arguably the world’s best striker ever since. At just 24 himself, Haaland is not much older than Šeško, but it’s a lofty comparison nonetheless. And to be clear, the pair have little in common stylistically.

Haaland’s game is built around one quality: taking a lot of shots and scoring bagfuls of goals. To that, you may say, “Well, Jack, that’s pretty obvious. He’s a striker, isn’t he?” And yes, that is typically a striker’s main focus. But Haaland stands out for how effectively he puts the ball in the back of the net while doing almost nothing else. 

His passes attempted per match ranks in the third percentile among positional peers in Europe’s top five leagues, despite playing for a notoriously high-possession team. He doesn’t rack up assists and he rarely dribbles the ball past defenders. 

Šeško, on the other hand, has a truly rounded profile that belies his stature and the typical stereotypes associated with a striker of his height. When people see strikers of Šeško’s height, they tend to assume they are “target men,” the type of forward who sprints up the pitch and into the 18-yard box waiting for crosses to head home or a pass to their feet that sets up a first-time finish. 

While Šeško can certainly win a header and fire a first-time ball, his game has much more to it than that. Namely, his dribbling production leaps off the charts thanks to his surprisingly silky feet. Šeško’s 1.37 successful take-ons per 90 minutes played puts him in the 90th percentile among strikers in the best European leagues. 

That figure is likely influenced by the German Bundesliga’s transitional style, as teams typically play higher defensive lines, thus giving forwards more space to run against defenders in one-on-one scenarios. But still, his numbers are so strong that they would be very likely to translate to a new league if he signs for a new club this summer.

Despite having a lanky, almost narrow frame, Šeško displays tremendous hip flexibility and control, which allows him to stay balanced with the ball at his feet and disguise his movements from defenders, as well as to create powerful shooting angles out of nowhere. 

In a December league match against Holstein Kiel, Šeško scored Leipzig’s first goal in a 2-0 win that saw him complete a dribbling sequence from half -field and create shooting space between three defenders. With two defenders bearing down on him and one in front of Šeško, the Slovene had the awareness and control to take a touch with the outside of his right foot, side-stepping the pressure and quickly releasing a snapshot on goal. 

The Holstein Kiel keeper saves the initial effort, but Šeško’s shot is so powerful that it bounces all the way back to him and Šeško scores on the follow-up, a tidy half -volley that also displays the great connection between his feet and hips.

Dare I say, Šeško has a touch of Zlatan Ibrahimović to him. He stands similarly tall to the legendary Swedish striker, and the two are both hyper-fluid movers for their size, capable of scoring audacious and unexpected goals. And while Ibrahimović, like Haaland, would represent a maximum-potential career outcome should Šeško reach comparable heights, it’s important to remember that Ibrahimović had somewhat of a slow-burn of a career. 

He was an important player for Ajax and Juventus in his early 20s, but Ibrahimović didn’t have a 20-goal season (counting domestic league play only) until he was 26 and playing for Inter Milan. So it’s far from a crisis that Šeško hasn’t quite hit that mark yet either. 

If Newcastle loses Isak to another club this summer, they could do far worse than to replace him with Šeško. Even more dangerously for the rest of the Premier League, if Arne Slot decides Liverpool’s Darwin Núñez experiment is over, the red half of Merseyside seems like a perfect platform for Šeško’s development. Arsenal might be Šeško-curious too, if another option falls through. 

Whatever happens, Šeško feels like a striker destined for the Premier League at some point, and I can’t wait to watch his awkwardly awesome acrobatics whenever he lands on English shores. 

Jack Hallinan is a senior writing about the top wunderkinds in men’s and women’s soccer in his column, “Rising Ballers,” which runs every other Thursday.