Giorgos Giakoumakis
The Eredivisie goal machine that came out of nowhere
It would be fair to assume that the Eredivisie top scorer award would automatically go to an Ajax or PSV player every season. But you’d be wrong: in seven out of the last ten campaigns, players from modest clubs like Heracles (Cyriel Dessers, 2020), Vitesse (Wilfried Bony, 2013), Heerenveen (Alfred Finnbogason, 2014 and Bas Dost, 2012) NEC Nijmegen (Bjorn Vleminckx, 2011) and AZ (Vincent Janssen, 2016 and Alireza Jahanbakhsh, 2018) have all topped the charts.
This season is unlikely to be an exception, with Giorgos Giakoumakis of VVV-Venlo miles ahead of the rest. By mid-February, the Greek striker had already netted 22 goals with his nearest challenger, PSV winger Donyell Malen, on 13.
What makes it even more remarkable is that the 26-year-old had never been a prolific goalscorer before; this season he has more than doubled his total career output. The summer bargain has virtually kept VVV in the top division by himself.
Giakoumakis was elected Player of the Month for January after a rocket restart following the short winter break. Within a month he scored 11 times, including four against both ADO Den Haag and Vitesse. If he continues, Giakoumakis may even break the all-time record of Coen Dillen, the PSV striker who scored 43 goals in one season in 1956-57.
It has come out of nowhere; the striker from Crete has never known form like it. Only in one other season had he ever reached double figures, scoring 11 for Greek side Platanias in 2016-17. Subsequent campaigns at AEK Athens, OFI Crete and Polish club Gornik Zabrze (on loan) yielded a grand total of six league goals.
Suddenly, he simply can’t stop scoring. And that is good news for VVV, who were hotly tipped for relegation, and with good reason: this season, two clubs instead of the usual one will drop out of the Eredivisie, and after their 13-0 humiliation at the hands of Ajax, Venlo were expected to be one of them.
That result hit the Limburg club hard, but also their striker. He admitted he had suffered for about a month from the defeat, even being afraid to go to the supermarket and face the people.
But he rose, and so did his team. His goals almost certainly mean that they will stay up, and it is not hyperbolic to say that he has done it singlehandedly. Those 22 goals came in just 21 appearances, and accounted for 63 per cent of his team’s league total. No other club in Europe’s top eight leagues are as reliant on one player for goals as VVV-Venlo. The next player on that list was Joao Pedro, scoring 46 per cent of Cagliari’s goals. Venlo’s reliance on their front man is at an absurd level.
Who is the mastermind behind the deal? All credit goes to technical director Stan Valckx. The former
PSV and Sporting player followed a tip all the way to Poland to watch Giakoumakis in action. Although he left the pitch injured, Valckx had seen and heard enough. The player was willing to come, and a deal was struck with AEK Athens for just €180,000.
Today of course, he is worth much more. He claims that he could have left in January to join a South Korean side for “big, big money”, but he chose to stay.
That is partly to emulate his idol Nikos Machlas, the former Vitesse and Ajax player who won the league’s Golden Boot in 1998 with 34 goals, but also for his international ambition.
No other club in Europe’s top eight leagues are as reliant on one player for goals as VVV-Venlo
The Greek national team is coached by Dutchman John van’t Schip, and the Eredivisie is very much on his radar. Giakoumakis made his debut last November scoring after just 17 minutes in a friendly against Cyprus.
What’s next? He will almost certainly move to a better league late this year. Is it wise? That remains to be seen. Nearly all the aforementioned predecessors never reached a strike rate like that again, meaning that Giakoumakis is likely enjoying the peak of his career right now.