Leeds United confirmed the signing of Jean-Kevin Augustin on Monday morning, landing him on an initial loan deal with an option to buy in the summer.
However, with the deal now officially announced, it could just be the wrong one from Victor Orta and co.
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Augustin’s Transfermarkt valuation once stood at £22.5m, and in 2017/18 he scored nine Bundesliga goals in just 1273 minutes, a ratio of a goal every 141.4 minutes.
That paints quite a good picture of Augustin as a player, but you can twist stats however you like to make anyone sound better than they actually are.
In reality, this is a man who scored just once in the entire calendar year of 2019, and no matter how you look at it, that’s not good enough as a number nine.
Add onto that the fact that he has just one assist over the past season and a half and there are plenty of red flags surrounding the RB Leipzig striker’s arrival.
This isn’t a player who is shy of taking shots either, he’s averaged 2.4 per 90 mins this term, while last season that figure stood at 2.6.
It seems as though he’s just as ineffective in front of goal as Patrick Bamford, and that his nine-goal haul in the German top-flight a few seasons ago was just a purple patch that he’s since been unable to recreate.
Bamford himself has these types of runs too. Back in 2017/18 he looked like the best striker in the league for a few weeks as he netted eight goals in five games in late February and early March, but he’d scored just once before that run.
The last thing Leeds need right now is another patchy and struggling striker, and that seems to be what they’re getting with Augustin.
Time will tell whether the move pays off, but an initial viewpoint suggests Orta may have got this one wrong.
In other news, Leeds may have signed the wrong winger.