Arsenal signing a European Golden Shoe winner from Sporting can only possibly mean that Mikel Arteta is trying to mimic Bolton’s 2003 summer transfer window.
It is the only possible explanation as to why Arsenal are targeting a striker who has scored 53 goals this season as part of their plan to win some actual trophies.
And it leaves us with only one course of action: transposing Sam Allarydce’s 2003 summer window in charge of Bolton onto Arsenal’s transfer plans 22 years later.
Arsenal summer signing No.1) Viktor Gyokeres
A simple enough and entirely plausible start, which absolutely will not develop into anything close to a theme.
Arsenal could sign Gyokeres as early as next week, although they might need to hold off the irresistible force that would be a Manchester United transfer hijack.
Gyokeres should leave Sporting this summer as a two-time league champion but the centre-forward will first want to navigate a pivotal weekend from which he could emerge with two more pieces of silverware.
One is team-based, with close runners-up Benfica awaiting Sporting in the Taca de Portugal final. The other could be the latest in a long line of individual awards and depends almost entirely on Kylian Mbappe and Mo Salah bottling it on the final day of their respective league campaigns.
The points system used for the European Golden Shoe means that Gyokeres and his ludicrous 39 goals in the Primeira Liga this season are only just more valuable than the 29 plundered by Mbappe for Real Madrid. If the Frenchman scores a single goal against Real Sociedad, that would be enough to leapfrog Gyokeres.
Salah is also lurking as the only other player within touching distance, but he needs two goals against Crystal Palace to overtake Gyokeres, as well as a blank from Mbappe, to inherit the award from Harry Kane.
If Gyokeres holds on he would be only the fifth European Golden Shoe winner to move to the Premier League, although Thierry Henry and Cristiano Ronaldo returned to former clubs years after winning the gong and Henrik Larsson joined Manchester United six seasons after achieving the unthinkable with Celtic.
The closest comparison with Gyokeres would be Mario Jardel, who left Sporting for Bolton in August 2003 after winning the European Golden Shoe in 1999 and 2002.
“This is the opportunity I need to resurrect my career,” the Brazilian said after one final difficult season in Portugal. “We have found a striker who is going to score goals for us on a regular basis,” added Allardyce.
Jardel left the Reebok Stadium after a single year in which he failed to score across seven Premier League appearances.
READ MORE: Who are the top scorers of 2025? Mbappe might win something this year…
Arsenal summer signing No.2) Jesus Vallejo
One of the next steps in the Bolton transfer template was obviously to sign a former European and La Liga champion from Real Madrid.
The Trotters had borrowed Ivan Campo for a year before making his stay permanent upon the expiration of his Bernabeu contract, when the Spaniard understandably decided he preferred living in Bolton instead of Spain.
Campo played more than twice as many games for Bolton as he did any other club, reinventing himself as a cultured defensive midfielder and claiming a League Cup runners-up medal.
It is a path Vallejo seems tailor-made for, the 28-year-old Spanish centre-half having never been able to establish himself in a decade at Real Madrid. There is talk of his contract being renewed, but it feels as though Dean Huijsen and possibly Ibrahima Konate being added to the defensive pecking order might change that.
Arsenal summer signing No.3) Jack Stephens
A believable enough series of events collapses in on itself with the suggestion Arsenal might risk their fanbase eating itself by bringing in a defender from a historically bad team.
There was a time, before The Derby Season, when Sunderland’s 2002/03 efforts were the worst to ever be inflicted on a Premier League campaign. The potent combination of Peter Reid, Howard Wilkinson and Mick McCarthy delivered 19 entire points in finishing dead last.
“It’s quite apparent to everybody that the strengthening of our defence is a priority,” said Allardyce when raiding said team for the free agent virtues of Emerson Thome.
The Brazilian only actually spent a season at Bolton before joining Championship side Wigan but that is plenty enough irrefutable proof that Arsenal must sign Stephens when Southampton release him this summer.
Arsenal summer signing No.4) Carlos Vinicius
Few could possibly have predicted what was to be unleashed on the Premier League in July 2003 when the fairly ordinary transfer of peripheral Southampton player Kevin Davies to relegation strugglers Bolton was completed.
Davies had been knocking around for years at St Mary’s and Blackburn without making much of an impact, but a union with Allardyce created a beautiful nightmare for defenders across the country.
For a time Davies held the records for most fouls and bookings in the Premier League and was a handy enough scorer to earn a solitary England cap and the contempt of Arsene Wenger.
Fulham forward Vinicius can never boast the same Barclays heritage but that FA Cup hat-trick against eighth-tier Marine lives long in the memory and as an imminent free agent jobbing around in mid-table, it is only right he becomes the first player since Emmanuel Adebayor to cross the divide.
Arsenal summer signing No.5) Ayoub El Kaabi
For all his great many foibles, Allardyce deserves immense credit for basically taking the concept of ‘dudes can literally just sit around and name old sports players and just have the best time’ and turning it into an actual functioning, thriving team.
Everyone has a favourite player from that iconic Bolton era (which rhymes with Zoltan Gera, who somehow was not signed for Bolton during this era). Some understandably appreciate the more obvious stylings of a Jay-Jay Okocha, Fernando Hierro or Hidetoshi Nakata, while others prefer the unheralded gems like Radhi Jaidi, Abdoulaye Faye and Bruno N’Gotty.
But the only actual right answer is Stelios Giannakopoulos and that is fine.
The Greek forward was “convinced by the gaffer Big Sam” to leave behind his adoring fans at Olympiacos, where he spent seven years winning as many titles, doing so in his final season as the club’s top scorer.
It might be a struggle for Arsenal to persuade Greek champions Olympiacos to part with top scorer El Kaabi for free considering his deal expires in 2026, but it is worth a shot at least and if Andrea Berta can’t pull it off, he should probably be fired.
