Wolverhampton Wanderers suffered a big blow earlier this season when Raúl Jiménez suffered a sickening skull fracture in an accidental collision with David Luiz during the Premier League game against Arsenal.
With the players health being the priority, Wolves fans will have been encouraged to hear that the Mexican has returned to light training, raising the hope of him being able to feature at some point before the end of this season.
Nevertheless, it is always better to err on the side of caution with these sorts of injuries, so it would not be a surprise if Jiménez does not play again during the 2020/21 campaign.
This has led to a bit of a problem for Nuno Espirito Santo he has lost his main striker, who has been responsible for the majority of Wolves goals since they were promoted to the Premier League a couple of seasons ago.
While the club broke their transfer record to sign Fábio Silva from Porto, he is still only 18 years old, and the plan was always to integrate him into English football gradually.
However, Nuno has been forced to use him much more than he would have wanted to in recent weeks, and the youngster has shown that he is still a raw prospect, rather than coming anywhere close to replicating Jiménez s impact for Wolves.
Thus, signing a striker in the January window seems like a priority for the West Midlands side, albeit one who would be content to play a backup role to Jiménez once he is back fit.
There have been rumours that they could move for Diego Costa, who was recently released by Atletico Madrid.
While there are obvious attractions to such a deal, since Wolves would not need to pay a transfer fee, and arriving at a deal could be made easier by the presence of Jorge Mendes, the Portuguese super-agent who has ties at Wolves and is Costas agent as well, we believe that Wolves can find better value in the market than moving for a 32-year-old injury-prone striker who may be past his prime, and who would also command huge wages, and a potential starting role which could cause issues once Jiménez is back to full fitness.
Thus, we have utilised our exclusive XGold tool to identify suitable replacements that Wolves could target in this window, taking into account that they would not want to spend too much money on one, as per the Sorare Review.
With this in mind, we have looked at the top five European leagues (Premier League, Serie A, La Liga, Ligue Un and the Bundesliga), along with the EFL Championship, the Greek Super League, the Austrian Bundesliga, the Portuguese Primeira Liga and the Turkish Super Lig for our shortlist, based on Wolves prior recruitment history.
In addition, we have also considered any free agents who may be available.
Data has been taken from Wyscout, and we have only considered players between the ages of 24 and 30, assuming that Wolves will want a somewhat experienced player to come in, rather than a callow youngster like Silva, or someone who is the wrong side of 30.
Our player profiles display metrics in terms of percentiles, which reflect the players performance on that particular stat in comparison to the rest of the players in the league at that position.
André Silva 25, Eintracht Frankfurt
Wolves preference for Portuguese players over the last couple of years is well known, with a number of players from the Iberian country finding a new home in Wolverhampton.
Thus, it is perhaps fitting that our first recommendation is another Portuguese striker, André Silva.
The 25-year-old has started this Bundesliga season extremely well fo
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