Brighton sign Brentford striker Maupay for £20m
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a striker. Brighton have completed the signing of Brentford forward Neal Maupay for a club record £20m.
The 22-year-old has signed a four-year deal with the Albion with the fee eclipsing that of the £18m forked out for Adam Webster 48 hours previously. It takes Brighton’s summer spending to just shy of £59m so far with three days of the transfer window still to go.
Maupay began his career in his native France with Nice, making his Ligue 1 debut at the astonishingly young age of 16 years and 32 days.
He went onto play 53 times for Nice over the following three seasons, scoring nine goals and earning Under 21 honours with Les Bleus before moving to Saint-Etienne for the 2015-16 campaign. He notched three goals from 23 appearances at Stade Geoffroy-Guichard.
Maupay dropped down to Ligue 2 with a season-long loan with Brest in 2016-17, plundering 11 goals in 30 games despite enduring an injury hit time.
That form attracted the attention of Brentford and the ‘Moneyball‘ transfer methods of Bees chairman Matthew Benham, hated enemy of our own Tony Bloom due to their intriguing master-and-apprentice rivalry in the world of football betting analytics.
Brentford paid £1.6m to take Maupay to Griffin Park and that’s proven to be money well spent. He scored 12 goals in 46 appearances in his first season at West London before having an astonishing campaign last time out, netting 28 times in 49 games and registering eight assists along the way.
That was enough to see him named Brentford’s Player of the Year while only Norwich City striker Teemu Pukki finished ahead of Maupay in the Championship’s scoring charts.
Maupay has played almost exclusively through the middle during his career. His highlight reel from last season suggests that his best work comes in and around the six yard box, with virtually all of his goals being clinical finishes from close range – only two of his 28 came from further away than the penalty spot.
Initially, that would suggest that Maupay will be in direct competition with Glenn Murray. But at 5’8, the Frenchman is rather on the short side to fulfil the same sort of target man role that Murray does with such aplomb and that Potter deployed the 6’2 Oliver McBurnie in with success at Swansea City.
Maupay could then find himself taking the spot of Jurgen Locadia should Potter persist with the 3-4-3 formation. The thought of Maupay picking up the pieces from Murray’s flicks and hold up play or converting the opportunities that fellow big-money arrival Leandro Trossard will be expected to create is a tantalising one.
The one thing that Maupay will need though is time. Because of the uncertainty surrounding his future with Brentford, he only featured in one friendly for the Bees and that was back at the start of July.
In effect, he hasn’t played any sort of competitive football so far this season. The Albion will need to get him up to speed before we see what kind of impact he can have on the Premier League. Hopefully, it will be one befitting of a £20m player.
