First-Time Finishes, Goal Instinct and Adaptability: Why Everton Are Signing Thierno Barry

Thierno Barry is set to play for a fifth club in as many seasons as he edges closer to joining Everton. Can he make the step up to the Premier League?

Simultaneously, all three of the following things about Thierno Barry are somehow true: he is still very young, he developed rather late, and he has achieved a decent amount in his career already.

He is now 22, on the verge of a move to Everton for a reported initial fee in the region of £27 million, but only started playing first-team football at the age of 19 (which, in this day and age, isn’t that young). And yet, this move will take him to the fifth club of his career in a fifth different country.

Only three years ago, Barry had just completed a season playing for Sochaux’s reserve team in the fifth tier of professional football in his native France.

From there, he jumped to the second tier in Belgium with a move to Beveren, where he shone playing first-team football for the first time.

After that, he made a move to Basel in Switzerland, where he got his first taste of European football, before then joining Villarreal last summer. Following a full season in La Liga, he is already, remarkably, headed for the bright lights of the Premier League.

It is testament to his adaptability that he’s made each move so successful he’s convinced another club at a higher level to sign him after just one season. The Premier League is a step up from La Liga, but it does bode well for Everton that he appears to have little problem with adjusting to life with new teammates in a new league in a new country.

It helped that his first move took him a relatively short hop from the foothills of the Alps to north Belgium, and he took the Belgian Challenger Pro League by storm in his one year there.

He finished the season as the league’s top scorer with 20 goals in 31 appearances, scoring at a rate of 0.7 goals per 90. His Beveren side missed out on promotion by a single point, and Barry was the league’s most threatening forward all season, topping the league for expected goals (16.6), non-penalty expected goals (15.0) and big chances (33). Meanwhile, his +3.4 overperformance compared to his xG was among the best in the league.

It’s worth noting at this point that the calibre of the opposition wasn’t exactly great. According to the Opta Power Rankings, at the end of the 2022-23 season that Barry spent in Belgium, the only club in the Challenger Pro League who were ranked among the top 1,200 teams in the world was his own team, Beveren. The worst of them – relegated Excelsior Virton – were ranked 3,010th in the world, four places beneath Oldham Athletic, who had just finished 12th in the National League.

That probably explains why he performed rather less well in front of goal after moving to the Swiss Super League. He still got chances consistently despite playing for an underperforming Basel, who finished the regular season ninth out of 12 teams, with his 12.0 xG the fourth highest of all players in the league. However, he finished the season with just nine goals, putting him ninth in the top scorers’ list, with his -3.0 underperformance compared to his xG being the fourth worst in the league. His big-chance conversion rate dropped from 48.5% in the Belgian second tier to 23.8% in Switzerland.

It was enough that he was still getting into goalscoring positions regularly, though. And he made a breathtaking start to the following campaign, scoring five goals in three league games as well as a hat-trick in the cup, which piqued the interest of Villarreal.

The Spanish side paid around £12m to sign him last August, and he took only a matter of days to score his first goal – a typically opportunistic neat header from close range against Celta Vigo.

Barry is an excellent poacher, a striker who focuses on scoring and finds openings close to goal through his clever movement, strength and 6-foot-5 frame. It’s no coincidence that only three players had more headed shots than him in La Liga last season (24), while he also ranked fifth for headed goals (three). And those numbers don’t take into account the fact that he had to deal with significant rotation, starting 25 of a possible 38 games, on top of the fact that this was, again, his first season in a new league.

He also uses his frame well to hold the ball up and bring others into play, but his game has always been primarily about scoring goals, and he was incredibly single-minded about doing so in his sole season with Villarreal.

Of players to play at least 2,000 minutes in La Liga in 2024-25, only Osasuna target man Ante Budimir (26.3) averaged fewer touches per 90 than Barry (27.7), and only Robert Lewandowski (8.2) and Budimir (8.8) averaged fewer touches per shot than him (9.9). Meanwhile, only Budimir (21.8%), Kylian Mbappé (20.9%) and Lewandowski (20.2%) had a higher proportion of their touches in the opposition’s box than him (18.7%).

His job was to stay high up the pitch and occupy the opposition’s centre-backs both by getting touch-tight to be able to engage in physical battles with them, but more importantly, by constantly making runs to challenge them.

The combination of his movement, relentless running and his focus on being a goal threat meant that, once again, he got into dangerous positions typically regularly. Only three players to play at least 2,000 minutes in La Liga last season averaged more big chances per 90 than him (0.97) or more non-penalty xG per 90 (0.45).

He has a natural instinct as a striker to get shots off quickly and at every opportunity. All 10 of his league goals excluding penalties or direct free-kicks for Villarreal came from first-time finishes; no other player who scored all of their goals (excl. penalties and free-kicks) with first-time finishes managed more than five.

Of the 30 players to have 50+ shots, only Mallorca’s Vedat Muriqi took a higher proportion with his first touch (82.7%) than Barry (80.3%). The Villarreal man ranked 10th in La Liga for total shots (71) but jumped up to second for first-time shots (57).

This isn’t to say he is only concerned with being a goal threat. He also recorded a not-insignificant 87 progressive carries (moving with the ball at least five metres upfield) and 31 carries followed by a successful dribble. As well as being a big, burly goalscorer, he is also adept with the ball at his feet.

There may be concerns about his ability to step up to the Premier League, particularly given he is joining a team who don’t create tonnes of chances. Everton generated a lower non-penalty xG total (40.8) than any other team in the Premier League last season aside from the three relegated clubs.

There’s also the fact that Barry underperformed compared to his xG for a second successive season, scoring 1.7 fewer goals (11) than his non-penalty xG total of 12.7.

The hope will be that Barry can cause Premier League defenders problems like he has done everywhere else he has gone, and will help Everton create more chances. One area where it appears he should be able to help out is with converting crosses: Everton ranked seventh for open-play crosses in the Premier League last season (485), but only Chelsea (two) scored fewer goals from them than Everton (three). Barry’s movement and aerial ability should help on that front.

It’s natural to have some reservations about someone who has risen up the leagues as quickly as Barry. There are plenty of players who have had one or two good seasons elsewhere but struggled to make the transition to the Premier League, so Barry could quite feasibly be about to join that list.

And how will he manage against stronger defences? The fact that seven of his 11 La Liga goals last season came against the teams that eventually finished in the bottom five suggests he didn’t fully acclimatise to playing the better standard of Spanish teams. Playing for a mid-table Premier League team who don’t create many chances, this transfer represents his biggest challenge yet.

Also, Everton hasn’t exactly been a prosperous home for centre-forwards in recent years. No Everton player has scored more than eight non-penalty Premier League goals in any of the last four seasons.

But Barry has adapted admirably and quickly wherever he has gone so far in his career, and he for one will believe he can make his move to England, just like every other transfer he has made, a success.

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