Dominic Calvert-Lewin’s 2025 revival is the Premier League’s best redemption story

A rush for strikers defined the summer transfer window in the Premier League.

Well over £400million was invested by English clubs – chief among them Liverpool, Newcastle United, Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea – ahead of the 2025-26 campaign.

The logic was clear. Proper strikers are back, baby. Gone are the days of a Roberto Firmino making clever, selfless runs to help get the best out of his supporting cast.

Erling Haaland is the meta in 2025. Feed the big, fast fella, and he’ll repay you with goals. As with the focus on set pieces, proper football men would approve of the tactical pendulum swinging back to something a bit more old school.

Sound logic. Which falls apart as soon as you consider Haaland is a freak. A total outlier. Like trying to sign your own Lionel Messi in 2011. Good luck.

The likes of Benjamin Sesko and Viktor Gyokeres might resemble Haaland in terms of a physical profile, but watching them huff and puff, you can’t escape the feeling that Manchester United and Arsenal tried to buy the Norwegian off Wish.com.

None of the strikers signed for a fee by Premier League clubs this summer have scored more goals than Dominic Calvert-Lewin, who Leeds United signed on a free.

We’re only at the halfway point of the season, and Calvert-Lewin has already bettered his Premier League goals tally from each of the last four campaigns at Everton.

Since notching a career-best tally of 16 league goals under Carlo Ancelotti in 2020-21, he averaged just four goals a season while struggling for form and fitness.

“People love to hang onto that, don’t they? That was a long time ago,” Calvert-Lewin told BBC Sport, after their reporter referenced his peak under Ancelotti.

“I’ve been through a lot since then. Lots of ups and lots of downs. A test of character, and I’ve hung in there and kept going and kept pushing. I’ve backed myself, and here I am now.”

Marty Supreme? Don’t believe the hype. Calvert-Lewin’s renaissance is 2025’s most satisfying story arc.

Like a footballing Neil Buchanan, the striker appears to be gradually putting together a St. George Cross with his beautifully simple poacher’s goal map.

Timothee Chalamet has nothing on the year’s most audacious, high-concept piece of marketing. Are you getting the message, Thomas Tuchel?

For all the discourse around an England recall, we’re at risk of missing the wood for the trees. Calvert-Lewin went to Euro 2020 as Harry Kane’s understudy. He played a grand total of 18 minutes at that tournament, almost all of them when Gareth Southgate’s Three Lions had the luxury of seeing out a four-goal lead over Ukraine in the quarters.

Things might get interesting if Kane suffers the classic tabloid-hystericising broken metatarsal on the eve of the World Cup, but for now it all feels as though there’s a bit too much noise around whoever watches on from the bench.

Whatever Calvert-Lewin finds himself doing in the summer, he’s already shut up those who’d written him off.

Roughly £200million was spent on Sesko and Alexander Isak, the Premier League’s new record signing. Calvert-Lewin has scored twice as many goals as the pair of them combined.

Isak’s replacement at Newcastle, Nick Woltemade, has deservedly been praised for a promising debut campaign on Tyneside – but even he’s been outscored by the Leeds man, and he cost £69million.

You go away from the headline-grabbing superstar names and the numbers are just as stark.

Filling Calvert Lewin’s void at Everton, Beto and Barry have mustered just three goals. What might’ve been, eh?

Wolves invested about £50million in signing Tolu Arokodare (who? exactly) and making Jorgen Strand Larsen’s move permanent. They’ve scored have scored a combined two goals this season. The relegation-bound outfit have mustered just three goals more than Calvert-Lewin in total.

The point being that he’s doing this in a league where goals don’t come easy. Kane never scored in six successive matches. In a whole season’s worth of games this calendar year, Haaland is the only player to break the 20-goal mark. Cole Palmer and Bukayo Saka have five Premier League goals in 2025.

Gyokeres is finding that out the hard way, managing just five goals in half a season for the Premier League’s table-toppers – a far cry from averaging 50 goals a year out in Portugal.

Gary Lineker, who made a career out of scoring the kind of goals Calvert-Lewin has been slotting away in recent weeks, even advised Gyokeres to take a leaf out of the Leeds striker’s book – and compared him to some of the sport’s most elite goalscorers in the process.

“I’ve watched him [Gyokeres] quite closely the last few weeks and I think he’s like most strikers, is one that waits to see where it’s going, the ball, waits until it’s crossed and then attacks the space,” Lineker said on The Rest Is Football podcast.

“That’s what defenders do, as a striker you got to gamble on where you think the ball might go and you go just as they’re about to cross it. You steal a march on the defender that way and lots of the time the ball won’t go there, but I don’t see him doing that very often.

“Dominic Calvert-Lewin did a perfect example of how to do that for the Leeds goal at Sunderland, perfect.

“He didn’t wait and to see where it was going to go. He went right, I pulled away and then he sprinted at the near post and hoped that the ball would be delivered there and it was.