Ian Wright says Arsenal had a striker who was even better than Thierry Henry as a youngster

Add as preferred source on Google

Arsenal have had their fair share of amazing strikers over the years.

Dennis Bergkamp, Robin van Persie and Ian Wright are all Premier League greats in their own rights.

Meanwhile, Viktor Gyokeres has just signed for Arsenal, and he’ll be hoping to follow the same sort of trajectory.

Thierry Henry is widely considered to be Arsenal’s greatest ever player, but according to Ian Wright, speaking on SDS, the Gunners once had a striker who had more potential than Henry as a youngster.

Nicolas Anelka was more highly rated than Thierry Henry

Wright was asked to discuss the best Premier League strikers of the 2000s, and he reserved some special praise for Anelka.

The pundit expressed some level of sadness around how Anelka’s career eventually went, claiming that, as a young player in the Clairefontaine academy, he was seen as having more potential than Thierry Henry.

“Just quickly we have to give Anelka more time. He’s not in that top three (strikers of the 2000s) But Arsene Wenger’s dream was to have Thierry on the left and Anelka as the number nine. Look at the amount of clubs Anelka had, it wasn’t meant to be like that. In respects of ability, even when Thierry Henry was at Clairefontaine, he (Anelka) was the best at Clairefontaine,” Wright said.

Nicolas Anelka compared to Thierry Henry

As a young player, Nicolas Anelka was seen as the brighter talent than Thierry Henry.

Wright isn’t wrong when he says this, just compare where the two players were at 20 years of age.

When Anelka turned 20, he was making a £22m move to Real Madrid, while, at that time, Henry was failing to hit double figures in terms of league goals at Monaco.

However, the tables quickly turned between these two, as the stats show.

Henry outdid Anelka in almost every possible metric during his career, showing that development isn’t always linear, and early potential doesn’t always turn into truly elite ability.

Anelka, of course, was a great player in his own right, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks he was better than Henry.