The £40m elephant in the room that Bournemouth may need to start worrying about

On the one hand, Bournemouth fans haven’t really got too much to worry about. They’re 13th in the putative Premier League table, just one place lower than they finished up at the end of the 2023/24 season. But on the other, there may be some cause for concern – they have just one win to their name and have managed just one point and one goal per game after failing to trouble the scoresheet in consecutive defeats. Oh, and their club record signing striker isn’t scoring any goals.

The early table slightly flatters Bournemouth’s results. They needed 1.26 points per game to reach 12th last season, and scored at a rate of 1.42 goals a match to get there, much of which was fuelled by the form of Dominic Solanke, whose goals lifted them well clear of the relegation battle despite a slow start under newly-appointed head coach Andoni Iraola. They have started at a limping pace again, but this time there’s no Solanke around to sort things out.

Evanilson, who was signed from Porto for £40.2m in a deal that was widely regarded as a coup at the time, has yet to register a single goal in his five matches, and suffered the indignity of missing a penalty in the eventual 1-0 defeat to Chelsea. He has moved past two expected goals without scoring an actual one, and only one player in the Premier League (Southampton’s Cameron Archer) has had a higher xG without scoring so far. It’s early days, but he has hardly lived up his billing or proven an effective replacement for the club’s primary source of goals.

The Brazilian scored with rock solid regularity in the Primeira Liga, only dipping slightly below a hit rate of a goal every other game in one of the last three seasons and ultimately totalling 42 goals in 88 starts across four seasons in Portugal – but he would hardly be the first player to find the leap from a mid-level European league towards the Premier League challenging.

The good news for Bournemouth is that early signs suggest that he will get the required service. Despite playing some tough matches in the early part of the season – they have already faced Chelsea, Liverpool and Newcastle United alongside away matches at Nottingham Forest and Everton – Bournemouth have actually been creating shooting opportunities at a better rate than they managed over the last campaign.

Last season, they averaged 1.47xG per match – so far, they’ve taken that up a notch to 1.72xG. Not an overwhelming difference, perhaps, but evidence of progress that can also be found in the stats of most of their attack-minded players. Marcus Tavernier, for instance, is generating an extra 1.5 shooting chances for his team every game and the output of Dango Ouattara, Ryan Christie, Justin Kluivert and Philip Billing are all generating more chances too.

That’s a testament to the extra fluidity that Iraola has gradually generated as he gets to grips with his first job in English football. During his time in Spain, his tactics focussed heavily on generating chances and territory from the wing-backs, but that proved a challenge at Bournemouth. He has slowly adapted and worked on the attacking shape and the reward has been more fluidity and more chances.

That improvement in terms of chance creation is even more impressive when you consider the relative difficulty of their fixtures so far, and the fact that they haven’t given up anything defensively in order to achieve it – their young back four, average age just 21 based on the starters used against Liverpool, is holding their vaunted opponents to 1.52xG per game, essentially the same as they managed last time around.

All of that implies that Iraola’s team will see their fortunes improve as the fixture list softens slightly – but so much still revolved around Evanilson finding his shooting boots. Last season, Solanke was the only player to reach double figures in the league and only two more (Kluivert and Antoine Semenyo) passed five. There is no immediate indication that anyone else in the Cherries’ squad will step up to the plate, so it’s the Brazilian or bust, and the volume of xG or chances created won’t matter if the player on the end of them doesn’t make them count.

Not that Evanilson is the only player at fault. Tavernier has actually had a slightly higher total xG – 2.1 – and has scored once from it. Semenyo has two goals from 1.9xG, which is rather more encouraging. Last year, the chances weren’t shared around but were focussed almost solely on Solanke, and now that continued improvement in attacking shape and movement means that more chances are falling to more players. Evanilson needs to find his shooting boots, but if they only need one attacking player to do so then at least there are now hypothetical back-up plans should he fail. Bournemouth have managed to diversify their attack, but without the end product they might have hoped for, at least so far.

The Brazilian’s career statistics suggest that he will likely come good to some degree, at least. He has been consistently solid in front of goal for the past three years and while not a world-class finisher, his off-ball movement and knack for finding half a yard of space means that he has continually made chances come about in high numbers. Even his penalty miss wasn’t really that bad – he was unfortunate that Robert Sánchez was able to pull off a spectacular low save from a shot which just wasn’t quite into the very corner of the goal. And lest we forget, he won the penalty himself.

Still, while there is plenty of cause for short-term encouragement in terms of the quality of overall performances and long-term encouragement because so many of those playing well are very young, there is also the worry that Bournemouth are not in a position to blow a £40m signing when they don’t have any other proven goalscorers. Evanilson will probably get there. But if he doesn’t, then one worries about whether they have the goals to stave off the relegation battle quite so easily this time around.