Viktor Gyokeres is the Swedish striker whose explosive goal-scoring has made him one of the hottest properties in Europe and could see him become soccer's next $100 million-plus player.
Yet Premier League clubs seemingly missed his rare talent when it was right under their noses.
Instead, Sporting Lisbon took a chance on Gyokeres and now stands to make a fortune after plucking him from the second tier of English soccer last year.
“He is ready for something bigger,” Sweden coach Jon Dahl Tomasson told broadcaster Viaplay ahead of Gyokeres' hat trick against Manchester City in the Champions League last week. “Everybody likes a goalscorer.”
Sporting bought Gyokeres from Coventry City for around $25 million. He has gone on to score 66 goals in 68 appearances — including 23 goals in 18 this term — and helped Sporting win the Portuguese title last season.
To put the 26-year-old forward's club statistics into context, this season he is outscoring Robert Lewandowski (19 in 17 games), Harry Kane (17 in 16) and Erling Haaland (15 in 16).
Gyokeres stretches defenses with his direct runs and is deadly in front of goal with rasping shots that find the corner of the net with unerring precision.
His impressive numbers have sparked speculation he will soon be on the move again — maybe during the January transfer window — with clubs like Manchester United, City, Arsenal, Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain all reportedly interested. Gyokeres' contract has a release clause of 100 million euros ($105.4 million).
Links to United and City are understandable. Gyokeres' former coach at Lisbon, Ruben Amorim, has just taken over at United. Hugo Viana, Lisbon's outgoing sporting director who signed him from Coventry, is on his way to City.
Gyokeres deflects comparisons to past Sporting greats Cristiano Ronaldo and Luis Figo.
“I try not to compare myself to them. I just want to be myself and do my best every day when I go to training and when we play,” he told UEFA.
A move to one of Europe's leading teams feels inevitable. The surprise is that it has taken so long for his talent to be more widely recognized.
Dalibor Savic coached Gyokeres at youth level for Brommapojkarna, a Swedish club with a reputation for developing some of the country's best emerging players.
“He was a late developer because he was not the best striker or the best player in Brommapojkarna at age 16, 17, 18, 19. We had better players in the academy and so on,” Savic, who was head coach of the club's under 19 and U21 teams, told The Associated Press. ”He made the right pathways through his career, but only he can do that because he’s so determined and focused and hard working and stubborn.
“If he if he aims at something, he will achieve it.”
Gyokeres' first chance in England came in 2018 when he joined Brighton — a team that specializes in developing players and then selling them on for huge profit.
Not on this occasion.
“Why has Viktor Gyokeres excelled after Brighton sold him?” read a recent headline on The Argus, the city's local newspaper.
It is a fair question. Brighton turned big profits on players like Moises Caiceido, Alexis Mac Allister and Marc Cucurella.
Yet Gyokeres was loaned first to St Pauli in Germany, then Swansea and finally Coventry, where he sealed a permanent move for around $1 million in 2021.
His numbers at Brighton and during his loan spells didn't point to the heights he has gone on to achieve, with seven goals in 28 games for St Pauli his best return.
“He needs to play under a certain system... he’s a power forward, he’s a deep running striker, so he’s good on transitions,” Savic said.
Despite scoring only three goals in 19 appearances on loan for Coventry, then manager Mark Robins was convinced about his quality.
“I remember saying when we first signed him that he’s in a rush, and that was how it appeared. He was looking to try to move as high as he possibly could do as quickly as he possibly could do," Robins told the Coventry Telegraph this month.
Gyokeres went on to score 40 goals in 97 games and take Coventry to the brink of promotion to the Premier League, before it eventually lost a playoff final.
That paved the way for his move to Lisbon where his performances have been impossible to ignore.
“He made the right choice going to Portugal,” Savic said. “I don’t think it's wrong to be the king of Portugal and score like 35-40 goals per year and be able to play in the Champions League every year and win the title.”
Proving he can score consistently at an even higher level will be the next challenge if Gyokeres follows in the footsteps of other top Swedish strikers like Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Henrik Larsson and moves to one of Europe's leading clubs.
Gyokeres has scored four goals in Sweden's four Nations League games since September. Sweden leads its group and hosts Slovakia on Saturday night.
“There’s no doubt that that Viktor is a top, top player, a top European player, but is he a world class player? I don’t know,” Savic said. “I would be happy to see him prove me wrong... make my question mark into an exclamation mark. Like, ‘yes — he’s a world class player.’"
James Robson is at https://twitter.com/jamesalanrobson
AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer
FILE - Sweden's Viktor Gyokeres, right, duels for the ball with Austria's Marcel Sabitzer during the Euro 2024 group F qualifying soccer match between Austria and Sweden at the Ernst Happel Stadion in Vienna, Austria, on June 20, 2023. (AP Photo/Florian Schroetter, File)
FILE - Sweden's Viktor Gyokeres scores his side's third goal by a penalty shot during the UEFA Nations League soccer match between Azerbaijan and Sweden at the Tofiq Bahramov Republican stadium in Baku, Azerbaijan, Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024. (AP Photo, file)
FILE - Sporting's Viktor Gyokeres celebrates after scoring during the UEFA Champions League opening phase soccer match between Sporting and Manchester City in Lisbon, Portugal, Tuesday, November 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Armando Franca, file)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
