Why are there so few traditional strikers left?

Everywhere you went this summer, you heard something about the dearth of top-level striking talent. It was almost like you couldn’t get away from it, pundits left and right crying out for a “real” centre forward to step up.

So where have all the traditional strikers gone?

There have been plenty of quality small strikers in the past, from Pele to Gary Lineker to Ronaldo, but for the most part, they played in the classic 4-4-2 formations. With them still somewhat linked to another forward, no one would bemoan their shorter stature but instead talk about their innate goal-scoring ability.

It took one particularly excellent Spaniard to tip the balance and that man is none other than David Villa.

The man from Langreo was a phenom in La Liga but the moment he transferred from Valencia to Barcelona, something changed in football. His new club Barcelona had operated in a 4-3-3 with Zlatan Ibrahimovic as the head of the front trio the season before, but Villa was the man who would take on that mantle.

They won the league and the Champions League that year, with Sir Alex Ferguson claiming that the 2010/11 side was the best he’d ever competed against. A high accolade indeed, shared by many that had seen both this side and the Spanish national team display what could be done with a less traditional lone striker.

Griezmann, despite not being a traditional striker, has enjoyed tremendous success

That was the catalyst; now everyone wanted to try their hand at playing a smaller, quicker forward.

Add into the mix the best players in the world being two attacking wide players in Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo and both give you another reason why academies and even youngsters are changing what they are doing.

In relation to the Argentine, academies are no longer ignoring the smaller players with good technical ability. They now have more evidence than ever that they can become excellent players and that even from wider areas, you can create great goal scorers.

That also echoes what the Portuguese man has done as well, scoring a glut of goals from a more untraditional position.

However, Ronaldo is built more like a traditional striker. Strong, tall, good in the air and great hold-up play, but he mixes that with the qualities of a wide player, giving the young players that watch him the confidence to play in a more unorthodox area than they might have been shoe-horned into in the past.

Then you look at the recent Spanish sides that haven’t implemented a striker, or the German side that is still strong without a traditional number nine and teams are working it out. There is more than one way to win.

Now, looking at the world of football, a number of great forwards are of the new style. Antoine Griezmann, Luis Suarez, Alexandre Lacazette, Karim Benzema, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Kylian Mbappe, Roberto Firmino, Gonzalo Higuaín, Paolo Dybala, Mauro Icardi, Dries Mertens, Sergio Aguero all fit into that kind of mould.

Then you take another look and see Alvaro Morata, Robert Lewandowski, Edinson Cavani, Radamel Falcao, Romelu Lukaku, Harry Kane, Olivier Giroud, Edin Dzeko and you start to see the imbalance.

In the end, the real question becomes whether playing a traditional striker is going the way of the dodo or is it waiting to come back in vogue and really, it’s a little bit of both.

Clubs and managers are now more varied in their preferences, academies are more wide-reaching which is now leading to different opinions. Both options work, both have produced great players and both will continue to have some effect on the game.

It even changed defending, with teams looking at pass-orientated players instead of the bustling brutes of the past. That’s worked to some extent but it’s also taken away a lot of high-quality centre-backs deemed not good enough because they can’t defend the speedy players “well enough” or contribute in terms of starting attacking play.

As always with football, it’s swings and roundabouts. Nothing ever stays gospel forever, someone’s always editing the script.

The “traditional” striker is gone, because there is no more tradition to uphold.