English club Stoke City are linked with Schalke striker Eric Maxim Chupo-Moting for the January transfer window according to the Mirror. Mark Hughes is in desperate need of bolstering his attacking options with Manchester City loanee Wilfred Bony being thoroughly disappointing since his arrival at the club in the summer.
Stoke have scored only 16 goals from their 14 games and the very fact that central midfielder Joe Allen has been the club’s top scorer with 4 goals gives us a clear picture of their struggles in front of the goal. The strikers, Bony and Bojan has managed a measly 2 goals each while Jonathan Walters only managed to score his first goal last weekend in his 12th game. Peter Crouch meanwhile is yet to get off the mark having played 8 games, even though 7 of them were from the bench.
With the options at the top misfiring, January might result in Bony leaving the club if any team from the Chinese Super League makes a move. Hughes thus needs to get in a striker without any further delay. Someone who can score the goals as well as contribute to the overall play making the forward advances more meaningful is what is needed at the Bet365 Stadium at the moment.
Standing at 6ft 3in, Chupo-Moting is a player well versed in both the areas of the midfield as well as upfront in the striking zone. The Cameroonian joined the youth academy of Hamburger SV in 2004 and made 23 Bundesliga appearances for the club.
The player came into the spotlight with his displays for Mainz 05 after leaving Hamburger and after a successful debut season 2011/12, where he scored 10 times, he repeated the feat in 2013/14 coming back from an injury which forced him to miss almost the entire last season.
Schalke snapped him up in 2014 and since then the versatile attacker has established himself as one of the most influential players at the Gelsenkirchen. In his debut season for the Royal Blues, he struck 9 times assisting another 6 from 31 games showing his potential of becoming a real threat up front.
This season, Chupo-Moting has been involved directly in 5 of the 15 goals Schalke has scored in the Bundesliga, which shows how he has been able to develop into a player able to step things up when needed.
A player able to play on the left flank in all of the advanced positions starting from the middle, Chupo-Moting’s technical and dribbling abilities will be a welcome addition to the Stoke squad. There’s a possibility that Choupo-Moting could sign a pre-contractual agreement in January to move to the Bet365 Stadium at the end of the season, with the Schalke man’s current deal expiring in June, though if Bony departs for pastures new, Stoke may pay to bring him to England sooner than the summer.
The Cameroonian forward is valued at around £7m which the Potters can easily afford if they move for him in January rather than having him for free in the summer of next year.
