Like so many overnight success stories, Dominic Solanke’s has been years in the making.
He was barely a month past his 17th birthday when his prodigious exploits at academy level saw him thrust onto the big stage at Chelsea, making his debut in a Champions League match, hailed by Jose Mourinho as a near-certainty to make the grade for club and country.
But there is no such thing as a sure thing. He ended up out in the cold at Chelsea, frozen out due to a contract dispute, never adding to what he calls that “token” appearance as a 17-year-old. He struggled to find his feet at Liverpool, a small fish in a big pond, and for his first 18 months at Bournemouth, a bigger fish in a smaller pond. By early July 2020, he had scored one goal in his first 59 Premier League appearances, derided by many as a striker who didn’t strike.
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And look at him now: 14 Premier League goals for Bournemouth this season, putting him behind only Erling Haaland and Mohamed Salah; a greater share of his team’s goal involvements (via goals or assists) than any other player in the competition this season; back on Gareth Southgate’s radar for a potential England call-up with the Euro 2024 finals looming; attracting interest from several leading clubs over a possible summer transfer.
Transfer talk was off the agenda — at his insistence, rather than Bournemouth’s — when Solanke sat down with The Athletic this week. He said he had no interest in fuelling headlines about his future. His focus is on Bournemouth and, increasingly, on England now that, at the age of 26, he is finally blossoming into the free-scoring all-round centre-forward he always felt he was destined to be.
Sitting in an executive box at the Vitality Stadium, Solanke looks out onto the pitch, the scene of so many celebrations this season. From the opening weekend against West Ham United, when he pounced on a loose ball, took it around Alphonse Areola and calmly rolled it into the net, he hasn’t looked back.
His two clinically taken goals against Newcastle United in November came at the same end of the pitch, as did an adroit turn and finish against Aston Villa in December. Since then, there has been an opening goal in a famous 3-0 win over Manchester United at Old Trafford, a hat-trick away to Nottingham Forest, and further goals against Fulham, Swansea City (in the FA Cup), West Ham and Newcastle. His confidence, as with the goals, is flowing.
It feels so different, he says, to those days when the goals just wouldn’t come. “Football is a confidence game,” he says. “When you’re flying and scoring, things start going well for you. It feels so much easier day to day. Right now, I feel great.”
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We talk about another goal he scored at that end of the Vitality Stadium when he was feeling less great. It came against Leicester City in the final weeks of the 2019-20 season when the country was in lockdown and football was being played behind closed doors. It was his 60th Premier League match and he had scored just once in the previous 59 (five starts and 16 substitute appearances for Liverpool, 16 starts and 22 substitute appearances for Bournemouth).
He scored twice that day in a 4-1 win that gave Bournemouth a glimmer hope of in their (ultimately doomed) battle to avoid relegation. What sticks in the mind is not the first goal but how, having ended his drought, he suddenly looked so assured in the way he took his second, anticipating and intercepting a stray pass, breezing past Ryan Bennett and nonchalantly poking the ball between the legs of the advancing Kasper Schmeichel.
Would he have done that so confidently if he had not ended his barren spell 20 minutes earlier? “Probably not,” he says. “Confidence is so important in football.
“At the end of that season, I was starting to find my feet a little bit. Then we got relegated. It was a shame, but it was a blessing in disguise for me. Going down to the Championship was an opportunity to get a run of games and start scoring regularly.”
He did just that, scoring 15 goals in his first season in the Championship and then 29 a year later as Bournemouth won promotion back to the top flight. A run of games at Championship level proved to be the making of him. The oddity was that this experience came when he was between the ages of 23 and 25 — looking back, he could have done with it much earlier.
Mourinho said in 2014 that Lewis Baker, Izzy Brown and Solanke, three stars of the club’s academy, “will be Chelsea players — and when they become Chelsea players, they will become England players, almost for sure” and “if in a few years (they) are not national team players, I should blame myself”.
They didn’t, of course. Baker, now at Stoke City, and Brown, forced to retire last year due to injury, stayed too long at Chelsea, a succession of unfulfilling loan moves causing their development to stagnate. Solanke saw little prospect of a first-team breakthrough at Chelsea and, amid an unedifying contract dispute, found himself frozen out in the final year of his deal there before he left for Liverpool.
With hindsight, Solanke feels that substitute appearance against Maribor in a Champions League group stage in October 2014 was a mere “token”. “There wasn’t really anyone breaking through (from the academy) to the first team,” he says. “I don’t think there had been anyone who had gone through and stayed there since John Terry. There were some great young players there, and we were all trying to be the one to get there, but we knew it was going to be difficult because Chelsea could always just sign whoever they wanted.”
Solanke was still only 17 when he went on loan to Vitesse Arnhem in 2015. He scored seven Eredivisie goals but didn’t enjoy the experience. Towards the end of his year there, there were reports that he would be relegated to Chelsea’s development squad the next season — rather than sent on loan again, as had been envisaged — “unless he lowers his £50,000-a-week wage demands”.
He has always denied making excessive financial demands and Chelsea have denied giving him that ultimatum, but what is beyond dispute is that he ended up frozen out the following season.
He talks about coming back from Arnhem “and then there was that stuff — that contract stuff — I’m not really going to get into all that” and how he “spent last year at Chelsea not really doing much”. At an important stage of his development, he was restricted to five appearances in their under-21 team.
But he still excelled at the Under-20 World Cup in South Korea in the summer of 2017, scoring four goals and winning the Golden Ball award for best player as England won the trophy for the first time. His potential was enormous. At 19, about to turn 20, he just needed to start playing regularly at club level. But at Liverpool, that seemed unlikely.
“I still believed I could play for a top side at that high level,” Solanke says. “That’s why I decided to go to Liverpool. But yeah, you probably could say it was a bit soon because their front three (Salah, Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mane) was probably the best in the world, so it was going to be difficult to get game time there too.”
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He played 27 times for Liverpool in 2017-18, scoring once in the Premier League against Brighton & Hove Albion, but only six of those appearances were in the starting line-up. The following season, with Daniel Sturridge and Divock Origi back from loan, he dropped two places down the pecking order.
Solanke talks positively about learning the art of playing as a centre-forward from training alongside Firmino and Sturridge — and from Didier Drogba and Diego Costa at Chelsea — but, by the start of 2019, his need to make up for lost time was obvious.
Bournemouth looked like the perfect move at the time, particularly given the belief shown in him by Eddie Howe. But it wasn’t easy, joining a team that was on the slide. The goals didn’t come. Was that unsettling? Confusing, even?
“I won’t say confusing, but… all I had known (as a young player) was scoring, scoring, scoring,” he says. “So when you come into the Premier League and men’s football, obviously that’s what you want to do straight away. But it’s never gonna… well, sometimes it can go like that for some players, but it’s difficult.
“I’m quite strong mentally. I always believed that it would happen for me. Obviously, at the time, it’s difficult because when it’s not happening for you, you start thinking, ‘When is it going to happen?’. But I always believed I would score goals. I scored throughout my whole youth career. I knew I could score goals. I knew it was going to come at some point. But…
“Like I said, everyone’s path is different. Some people just break straight through and don’t look back, which is great. Some people work their way up from the lower leagues and go on to fulfil their potential a bit later on.
My path, having been at big clubs at a young age where it didn’t quite happen, I needed to take a few steps back to come forward again.”
Those two years in the Championship helped Solanke find his rhythm. It can be an unforgiving competition, but he draws a contrast between playing in a relegation-threatened side, struggling for confidence and feeding on scraps, and playing in a team dominating matches and challenging for promotion, “getting all those minutes and scoring those goals”.
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In that 2019-20 season, which saw Bournemouth relegated from the Premier League, Solanke recorded 1.75 shots per 90 minutes. In their promotion-winning campaign two years later, that figure doubled (3.5 shots per 90 minutes). He was starting games regularly, getting far more opportunities and showing that he had not lost the goalscorer’s instinct. The goals and the confidence started to flow again: 15 goals and eight assists in his first season in the Championship; 29 goals and seven assists in the second.
But the step up in class, upon returning to the Premier League last season, still proved difficult. He won praise for his out-of-possession work, with then-coach Gary O’Neil following Howe in suggesting that “unless you watch Dom regularly and closely, some of the stuff he does can go unnoticed”. But a total of six goals and seven assists fell short of expectations, not least Solanke’s own.
This season has been a different matter. It invites questions about whether he has been doing something different physically or psychologically, but no, he feels it is simply a case of a) maturing as a footballer and as a person and b) thriving in a more expansive team — and, as can be seen in the graphic below, a slightly different role — under his new coach Andoni Iraola.
“It came as a bit of a shock to everyone when it first happened,” Solanke says of the decision to replace O’Neil with Iraola last summer. “But he’s a great coach. He loves for us to press (the opposition). It’s a different style to last season. It was never going to happen straight away, hence we had a bit of a slow start in the Premier League. But everyone bought into it and we managed to get up to speed with it. I think it suits us.
“Pressing has always been part of my game. I work hard and I like to press. We have always been a pressing team for as long as I’ve been here. (Under Iraola) it’s very detailed. He loves his detail.
“We have a lot of meetings and obviously it takes time to memorise it so that it becomes second nature to all of us: being in the right place, pressing at the right times. It’s not just everyone pressing everywhere. There’s a lot of structure to it. We’re all on the same page now, which is great.”
The evolution of Bournemouth’s pressing, as they have adjusted to Iraola’s approach after a poor start to the season, was analysed in detail on The Athletic here. “We all know which defender each of us is meant to be pressing or marking,” Solanke says. “The person playing behind me knows where he’s going, the two wingers the same, and it’s quick now.
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“When we win the ball back, we like to play fast in transition. I’m obviously the highest up the pitch, so that was always going to benefit me. It’s happened a few times this season where we’ve won the ball back high up the pitch and it has resulted in me getting goals.”
There have been times in the past, he says, when his pressing has been more instinctive and less focused, taking him out of central areas — “and if you’re too tired or you’re not in the right position when you win the ball back, you’re not going to be able to put it in the back of the net”.
It’s not about pressing more. It is about pressing smarter.
“With experience, the more you play, you get wiser as a footballer,” he says.
The day before the game against Forest in December, assistant manager Tommy Elphick and first-team performance analyst Tom Webber had a session with Solanke, highlighting on one hand his aerial prowess and, on the other hand, the room for improvement when heading the ball goalwards.
“And the next day, I managed to score two great headers, which was funny,” he says. “It’s something I need to do more.”
Solanke knows he must be doing something right. For one thing, he is finding his name linked to various bigger clubs: Arsenal, Newcastle, Tottenham Hotspur, West Ham. He doesn’t want to fan the flames of speculation. Not when he is in the form of his life.
He is happier to acknowledge his sudden status as a must-have asset in Fantasy Premier League, snapped up by more than half a million of the game’s players in a single week after his hat-trick at Forest. “That’s probably 80 per cent of what people speak to me about these days,” he laughs. “I get, ‘Make sure you score on the weekend’, ‘You’re my captain this weekend’.
“I don’t play it. Some of the players here do, but it always fizzles out towards the end of the season. But a lot of people take it quite seriously. It’s quite funny really. I think I’ve done quite well for a few teams this season. Hopefully, I can keep getting them some points.”
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As for his own version of fantasy football, yes, there are times when Solanke lies back and thinks of England.
He was called up by Gareth Southgate in November 2017, shortly after his move to Liverpool, and made his senior international debut against Brazil. But more than six years on, that remains his only cap, with Dominic Calvert-Lewin, Ollie Watkins, Tammy Abraham, Callum Wilson, Ivan Toney and Eddie Nketiah all overtaking him, at various times, in the race to be Harry Kane’s understudy.
Rather than have a clear hierarchy for that role, Southgate has often simply gone with the player in form. Right now, that would be Watkins, Toney or Solanke.
“Everyone’s dream is to play international football and represent their country,” Solanke says, “so it’s always going to be in my mind. I just need to carry on doing what I’m doing and keep scoring goals for Bournemouth, to try to win as many games as we can. Then it will be down to Gareth who he ends up picking.”
Solanke looks far more ready for an England call-up now than he did in 2017, when he had yet to start a Premier League game. “I loved it. It was the best thing,” he says of that game against Brazil. “But yeah, to be playing for the seniors, for England, you need to be one of the best players in your position in one of the big leagues.”
For a time, Solanke was one of those who personified English football’s struggle to integrate and develop elite young talents at first-team level. But he agrees there is far more competition for places now.
“All over the pitch, there are so many great talents and new players coming through,” he says. “There are so many top English strikers now. It’s not just players in England. There are English players doing well in other leagues, talented players in all positions. It just shows the talent we’ve got.”
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So does he come off the pitch on a Saturday afternoon anxiously wondering whether Watkins, Wilson or Toney has scored? “Ha ha, no. I just try to score as many as I can,” he says. “There are so many top English strikers. We’re all going to try and score as many goals as we can. It’s up to the manager who he will take to the tournament.”
Solanke feels this is the best Bournemouth team he has played in since he arrived on the south coast five years ago. “It’s the first time I’ve felt we can go out and beat anyone,” he says.
Even Manchester City, their opponents on Saturday evening? “Yeah, I said everyone,” he laughs. “Obviously, Man City is a really, really tough one, but we need to give it a go. It’s on our turf. We hope we can pull it off.”
What are Pep Guardiola’s team like to play against? “Really difficult,” he says. “We know they’re one of the best teams in the world with one of the best managers ever. He’s got his own style of play, we know they’re going to dominate the ball. We need to be at our best and for some of their players not to be on it on the day. But we believe we can upset them.”
Beating Manchester United (even at Old Trafford for the first time in Bournemouth’s history) was one thing. Beating their neighbours — the European champions — is quite another. It has been the same with Liverpool when they have been in the groove in recent years. He was in the form of his life when his former team came to Bournemouth last month, but found his threat smothered by Ibrahima Konate and Virgil van Dijk.
He doesn’t hesitate to call Van Dijk the best central defender in the world. “Definitely,” he says. “He’s probably one of the best centre-backs to have played the game. It’s so difficult to play against him. Him and Konate, two big strong centre-backs, they’re such a good partnership.”
Liverpool face Chelsea in the Carabao Cup final at Wembley on Sunday, just as they did in 2022. Had Solanke been more patient, more willing to accept his place in the pecking order, he might still be at one or other of those clubs.
But Solanke’s journey illustrates the importance of getting out there and challenging yourself at a club that is willing to give you the time to develop. There is always a pressure driving players towards the biggest clubs — often it is intensified by agents, seeing pound signs, and, yes, by the media’s lust for big-money, big-name, big-club transfers — but sometimes it is better to be that bigger fish in a smaller pond.
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Now that he is flourishing in the Premier League at last, talk of an “upward” move seems natural. Tottenham and West Ham are the latest clubs linked with a summer bid, but there is also reported interest from Newcastle, where his former manager Howe recently expressed his continuing admiration, and Arsenal. It would be a surprise if he has not been mentioned in recruitment meetings at Chelsea, the club whose academy he joined as an under-eight and progressed so encouragingly until things acrimoniously.
It is not known whether the new contract he signed at Bournemouth in September included any provisions for a sale. He is too respectful to Bournemouth — grateful to the club and to successive managers for the patience and support they have shown him — to indulge in talk of a summer transfer.
That contract last year followed an impressive start to the new season, with two goals in his first four Premier League appearances. It has been followed by 12 goals in 20. Some players seem to slacken off after signing a big new deal. Solanke has done the opposite.
But if any event last autumn marked a watershed in Solanke’s life, it was the arrival of his daughter Amaya. His entire routine after training these days revolves around her. “It’s back home and spending the rest of the day with her, taking her on walks,” he says. “That’s pretty much my life now.
“When you become a dad, your mindset changes. You grow up. You start kind of… living for them, if you know what I mean.
“It’s given me an extra boost, an extra motivation. We went on a nice winning streak here at the stadium when she was coming to games. I like to say she’s my little good luck charm. So yeah, it’s been a nice few months. Life’s good.”