‘Harsh feedback’ – How Eintracht Frankfurt turned Hugo Ekiteke into £69m Liverpool star

“The strikers are always more brilliant,” Eintracht Frankfurt sporting director Timo Hardung says with a smile.

Hardung knows that it is the profit the Bundesliga club has made of nearly £300m selling strikers over the past six years that attracts the headlines and attention.

“The hardest part of our sport is scoring a goal, so they obviously attract a lot of attention,” he says. “But I think we were able to improve and develop a lot of players.”

Hardung is right, of course, that it is not only the strikers who have excelled for Frankfurt.

Ecuadorian international Willian Pacho is a prime example of this, having been signed from Royal Antwerp for just under £12m in July 2023, with the defender leaving a year later to join Paris Saint-Germain for around £35m.

But strikers are often talked about, and for good reason.

Since Luka Jovic joined Real Madrid and Sebastien Haller moved to West Ham in the summer of 2019, Frankfurt have seen Andre Silva (RB Leipzig), Randall Kolo Moani (Paris Saint-Germain), Omar Marmouche (Manchester City) and Hugo Ekitiki (Liverpool) pass through the club to big profits.

“I can’t say we do anything more specific with them than in any other position,” Hardung adds. “But we try to play attacking football, create a lot of chances, and I think we are a good club to have the opportunity as a striker to score our goals.

He added: “We try to press high and attack the goal as much as possible, and this certainly gives our attackers the opportunity to shine.”

That was the case for the 23-year-old Ikikiti, who will return to Deutsche Bank Park with Liverpool in the Champions League on Wednesday.

Ekitiki initially arrived on loan for the second half of the 2023-24 season after struggling for minutes with Paris Saint-Germain, who he joined 18 months ago from Reims.

His move to Frankfurt quickly became permanent, and the French striker scored 15 goals and eight assists in the Bundesliga last season, the fourth-most goals among players aged 23 or under in Europe’s top five leagues.

“We just saw its potential,” says Hardung. “We saw his strengths and felt this could fit well with the style of football we want to play.

He added: “He was a young footballer who had a difficult time, and he did not get as much playing time as he wanted, which is not very surprising because Paris Saint-Germain is a big club, but we saw the opportunity there and made the deal.”

“[We] Tell Ekitiki what kind of path we will give him, what kind of ideas we will have, where we would like him to improve, but also where we will see his strengths that really give us a chance to win more football matches.