Serhou Yadaly Guirassy is 6′ 2″ Arles, France-born striker who plays for German club VfB Stuttgart as well as the Guinea national team. His club sits in second in the Bundesliga, two points ahead of Bayern Munich and he sits atop the league’s scoring charts having netted 14 times so far in the league and 15 times overall. That’s why he was Player of the Month for September.
Stuttgart is his seventh club. He’s scored 112 times in 289 appearances and has hit a real purple patch this campaign, having already beaten his total for the whole of last season. While the English press has been documenting Harry Kane’s start in Germany, this lad has outscored him by six goals to date.
Guirassy started his career playing for Laval. From there he was signed by Lille for around €1m. He did well in a brief stint in the Lille B-team, scoring four in four, but struggled to establish himself in the first team, making just nine appearances. He was sent to Auxerre in the French second tier to get some game time in 2015-16. He did well and was transferred to Koln for a mere €3.8m. But he struggled in Germany and found it hard to score and to keep his place, netting just nine times in 45 appearances. This meant he was sold to Amiens SC for €6m. But the club was relegated and although he’d scored nine goals for them he was sold for €15m (his price keeps rising) to Rennes in 2020-21 for whom he netted 25 goals in 81 games.
At that point he was loaned to Stuttgart and had a cracking campaign last season, scoring 14 in 28 and helping the club to survive in 16th. However, as of now, they’re 2nd and are a bit of a surprise package, not least because Guirassy has scored 15 times in nine appearances making him the top scorer in Europe’s top leagues.
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He scored 10 goals in the first five matches of 2023, including his first Bundesliga hat-trick which came against Mainz, to equal a previous record set by Robert Lewandowski in 2020-21. He also set the Bundesliga record for most goals by a player in the first seven matches of a season by scoring a hat-trick within 15 minutes in a 3-1 win against Wolfsburg. This set the record at 13 goals, overtaking Lewandowski’s bar of 11 in both 2019-20 and 2020-21. Pretty nifty.
The club made his move permanent at a cost of €9m and put him on a three-year contract. He might just be one of those players who matures a few years later than most and I think we all love those players more than the child prodigy. It speaks of developing with experience and a long climb to the top.
Although he turned out for French international youth teams, he’s settled on representing Guinea, probably figuring that the chance of getting in the French first 11 are pretty remote.
Something has happened to Guirassy this season. He seems to just be a lot more clinical than previously with a 48% conversion rate in the league, five percent ahead of Kane’s. I suspect we’ll see a lot more of this sort of form from older players as improved fitness takes their peak years from being 27-30 to 30-33.
Although technically right-footed he scores all sorts of goals – left foot, right foot and with his head. He scores tap-ins, cool penalty-box finishes and first-time long-range strikes. He’s got pace, can out-run a defence and is a direct runner. Yes, he’s the complete striker that you might never have heard of. And if your club needs a complete striker and has got north of £40 million to spare, he could be yours. He’s got pace through the centre, can chop it back to slot it home or dribble through a defence. What more do you want?
He is a classic case of a player who has always shown promise across the last 10 years finally jettisoning all the useless bits of his game and honing all the best parts. It’s as if he’s needed the experience of playing over 250+ games to get his form onto a new level. So much so that now he looks frightening as a centre-forward. With a 48% hit rate it suggests if he misses once he won’t miss twice.
