Now the drawn-out Victor Osimhen to Galatasaray saga has reached a conclusion, attention must turn to performances on the pitch.
The Nigeria international thankfully has plenty of credit in the bank off the back of a stellar 2024/25 campaign. In it, he hit 37 goals in 41 appearances, breaking all kinds of records in Turkish football and helping Cim Bom to a league and cup double.
That season, however, Osimhen was on loan from Napoli; considering Galatasaray have now paid a record €75 million, that output will almost certainly be considered the acceptable minimum going forward. And while Africa’s most expensive footballer ever did amass that total despite not playing the first four matchdays (therefore, in theory, he could get more), that encapsulates the biggest question around this transfer: what level of production would be enough to justify what the Turkish champions have spent?
What would make Galatasaray’s Victor Osimhen purchase worth it?
No one pays that sort of money to get what they already have. When Napoli paid €78.9 million to snap him up for Lille, they got a league title out of it, but that was a club working from a lower base, having not won Serie A for over 30 years.
Galatasaray have won six of the last 10 Super Ligs, five of them without needing Osimhen. Blowing the previous Turkish transfer record out of the water by 300% just to amass more of the same seems counterintuitive: are bragging rights over Fenerbahce really that important? And that is before even taking the salary package into account.
These Galatasaray fans put on masks and tracked Osimhen’s flight to Istanbul on a projector for his unveiling 😅🇹🇷 pic.twitter.com/LtQ5VsxLPJ
— Football on TNT Sports (@footballontnt) July 31, 2025
This, then, has to be part of an aggressive push to break new frontiers in Europe. By virtue of winning the league, the club has direct passage into the Champions League round robin phase. While reaching the highs of 1989, when Galatasaray reached the competition’s semi-finals, are probably out of reach, only a really deep run would make such an outlay for a superstar striker worth it.
Expectation through the roof for Victor Osimhen
While success in Europe is by no means a one-man operation, thankfully for them, Osimhen boasts a strong record in Europe, with 19 goals in 32 matches going back to his time at Lille. That also includes last season, when he scored six in seven for Gala in the Europa League. Osimhen will need to tap into that vein again; the club have made significant investments alongside, most notably in acquiring Leroy Sane from Bayern, but it is the 2023 CAF Player of the Year they will look to when the going gets tough.
What that means for him in practical terms? No more Mr Nice Guy, no more passing on responsibility, giving up penalties, applauding poor decisions from teammates and the like. In doing all of that last season he won the fans over – loan players are typically seen as tourists, but his actions made clear that he was not only passing through, but embracing the Gala experience through and through.
Now, though, as the centre-piece of a very costly project, he will not be graded in the same way. The only thing that will matter is how much he scores, how much he wins, how much the team wins. This latter is important: every result will be placed at his feet, every mistake will be scrutinised in a way it was not before. So, what would justify that fee? In a word: perfection.
