The £17m ideal Leicester City striker signing who could be vital in winning relegation battle

With stringent financial constraints in place ahead of a season in which they face the possibility of a points deduction for profit and sustainability breaches, Leicester City have not made a huge impact on the summer transfer market as yet – but that could be about to change, with reports suggesting that the Foxes are on the bring of signing Bayer Leverkusen striker Adam Hložek. On paper, it’s a very exciting signing for a team expected to face a relegation battle, but can they get the Czech back to his best?

Hložek is expected to arrive on a season-long loan deal with a clause that obligates Leicester to buy him if they stay in the Premier League. Fabrizio Romano reckons he would eventually cost €20m (£17.1m) with only the “fine details” left to be sorted out, while other reports from Germany claim it’s closer to €18m (£15.4m) with up to €4m (£3.4m) as an initial loan fee. Whatever the damage, it’s certainly a deal with plenty of potential upside.

As a teenager, the now 22-year-old Hložek was smashing goals in for fun while playing for Sparta Prague and providing plenty for his team-mates, too. Equally comfortable playing as a number nine or on the left wing, he managed 26 goals and 21 assists over the course of 60 games across the 2020/21 and 2021/22 seasons – an impressive rate of return which persuaded Leverkusen to splash a reported €22m (£18.8m) on him. But things haven’t really got according to plan in the Bundesliga, and now they’re prepared to let him leave at a potential loss.

In 80 matches across all competitions, Hložek has scored 14 goals and set up 11 more, but he struggled to make an impact in big games and gradually slid down the pecking order and was largely restricted to a role as an impact sub during their remarkable recent double-winning campaign. He was struggling at international level, too, and has scored just twice in 34 senior caps for his country.

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There has been a creeping feeling of a player struggling to make the step up to the top level. At Sparta, he was able to bully defenders with his physicality (Hložek stands at 6’2” and packs plenty of muscle) and dribble past them with impunity, but at Leverkusen he’s struggled to hold the ball up when playing as a central striker and for all that he has plenty of pace, he’s struggled to beat defenders one-on-one in the way that he did as a teenager, especially when up against the very best.

The question, then, is whether Hložek’s ceiling is a little lower than it had appeared to be when he was coming through the ranks in Czechia, or whether he just needs some confidence and the right coaching to be the destructive forward he threatened to be. It looks like Leicester are about to find out.

If they do get Hložek back to his best, however, he could easily make a huge difference in their potential scrap for survival. With Jamie Vardy getting even longer in the tooth and less able to play 90 minutes at full steam every week (the 37-year-old only made it through one full Championship match in 2023/24), Hložek could easily function as a like-for-like replacement when needed, flying off the shoulder of the last man and thundering towards the goal. He probably isn’t quick as fast as Vardy has been, but he’s certainly no slouch.

And he can provide some of that same propulsion down the flanks when needed, too. He isn’t a creative force who will unlock defences with sharp passes but he will get forward and get into good shooting areas from out wide – and while he wasn’t trusted with many starts by Xabi Alonso over the course of the last year, on average he was worth 0.6xG’s worth of chances per game through the Bundesliga season. If he can go at a rate like that for Leicester, he wouldn’t need to find all of his best finishing form to be worth enough goals to make a telling difference in a relegation fight. Besides, he can kick a ball really, really hard, and nobody at the King Power Stadium would complain if the saw a few goals like this…

Signing Hložek would be a calculated risk, but few players have the potential to make quite so much of an impact without breaking the bank, at least in terms of up front cost, and a hard reality of this season is that Leicester will have to be cautious with their spending to make up for past mistakes. But if they complete this deal and get him playing with confidence, he could prove to be a very shrewd acquisition indeed.

Update: Just when all seemed to be sorted, disaster struck - despite completing a medical at Leicester, Hoffenheim came in with an eleventh-hour bid and successfully hijacked the transfer with a permanent deal. If the young Czech does finally get going at the top level, it won’t be at the King Power. The transfer window is cruel...