Strikers don't matter. In fact, you might even be better off without them. That, at least, seemed to be one of the lessons behind Manchester City and Liverpool's recent domination of the Premier League.
Now there are plenty of differences between how the two best teams in England -- and perhaps the world -- came to dominate on the field. Liverpool never stop running; City reasserted themselves by running less. Liverpool turned their full-backs into attacking midfielders; City's entire team is attacking midfielders. Liverpool blow you off the field like the weather; City systematically pick you apart at an almost molecular level.
However, the one thing Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp's teams shared was something they both didn't have: a center-forward. Man City scored 99 goals, and Liverpool notched 94 -- the sixth and ninth most in league history -- without a player occupying the role that historically provides the majority of those goals. Given how dominant both sides were, as arguably the two best Premier League teams of all time, it became really hard to argue that they overcame their lack of a certain classical player profile. Rather, it was more likely the opposite: Manchester City and Liverpool were so good because they didn't play with strikers.
Then the season ended and the two clubs almost immediately spent more than $140 million to sign a pair of large, powerful, central strikers in Borussia Dortmund's Erling Haaland and Benfica's Darwin Nunez. So what's going on? While both clubs were at the forefront of one tactical trend, they might already be preparing for the next one.
