Speaking the day after facing last season’s Champions League finalists, Borussia Dortmund, Mika Biereth jokes about how tired he is. It was the 21-year-old’s fourth start in the competition this season, and the biggest match of his career so far — a career that has been on an incline since he swapped Motherwell for Sturm Graz in January.
“I felt there was unfinished business, so I decided to come back,” the former Arsenal striker, who was on loan at the Austrian club last season before joining permanently in the summer, tells The Athletic. “The team won the double and it’s about trying to do it again, which is probably more difficult than winning it the first time.
“The first loan I had in the Netherlands (at RKC Waalwijk in 2022-23) was not a success. From the end of that period, if you had told me by the end of the next season I would be competing for a league and a Champions League spot, I wouldn’t have believed you.”
The 18 months since Biereth’s Dutch venture ended can be split neatly into six-month segments.
He scored six and assisted five goals in the first half of last season at Motherwell. The Denmark Under-21 international, who was born in London and is eligible for the Danish national team through his father, then scored nine in all competitions in the second half of the campaign to help Sturm Graz win the Austrian Bundesliga and OFB-Cup. The league triumph was the club’s first since the 2010-11 season.
Since permanently signing for a club-record fee in the region of £4million (with a sell-on clause for Arsenal), he already has another nine goals in all competitions, with his eight in the league making him joint top scorer, sending Sturm Graz three points clear after 13 games.
“A big factor was how I felt in the club,” he says of his return in the summer, “around the building, with the manager, the sporting director and the players. I really felt like a part of something. Then, the opportunity to be the starting striker for a Champions League club at 21 was one I couldn’t turn down.”
Six of the 11 who started away at Dortmund last week were aged 21 or under. Sturm Graz have also fielded three out of the 10 youngest lineups in the competition this season, with those average ages ranging from 22.7 to 23.4. They are still looking for their first points of the league phase, but have lost three of their four games by just one goal.
That exposure, mixed with Sturm Graz and Austria’s growing reputation as an environment for developing footballers, were also key to Biereth’s move.
“They’re a selling club where they’re trying to bring in top talent, give them a platform and sell them,” he says. “As examples, you’ve got Rasmus Hojlund, Emanuel Emegha now playing at Strasbourg in Ligue 1, and Alex Prass who was sold to Hoffenheim this summer.
“In recent years, they’re really stepping up in terms of bringing talent in and then selling them at a good profit and that was without Champions League. Now, having added Champions League experience and once you start winning titles against the likes of Salzburg, I think people give a lot more recognition of that platform.
“Since Red Bull took over in 2005, Salzburg has been the biggest club, with the most money to recruit the best talents and give them that platform. They’ve had Erling Haaland, Dominik Szoboszlai, and now Strahinja Pavlovic and Noah Okafor have gone to AC Milan. When you look at the Austrian Bundesliga, you can see a crazy amount of talent that has trodden that path before.”
When Biereth was on loan at Sturm Graz last season, the young forward scored three goals in four Conference League games amid his first experience of three-game weeks. It took time to adjust after initial success. “The first few weeks were really good,” he says. “I scored in my first game and just kept scoring but then fizzled out a bit.
“It came towards the end of the season where pressure is high, your body gets tired and I don’t think I coped as well as I could have. You just play, sleep and recover. There was nothing else to do because you’re too tired. So that’s definitely something that I think I’m taking into this season and how to manage the body and how not to fizzle out and how to try and stay consistent throughout the whole season.”
On last week’s trip to Dortmund, the hosts were expected to dominate possession, which meant Biereth was pressing for large spells of the game, but the young Dane and his team-mates grew in confidence the longer the game stayed goalless. He had one chance, headed just over, but then Dortmund took the lead in the 85th minute.
Of that night at the famous Signal Iduna Park, Biereth says: “As an experience, that stadium is absolutely crazy. There were 81,000 very loud fans there and that yellow wall does become a big old wall.
“Only losing 1-0 at the very last minute was frustrating to take. At this level, I’m lucky if I even get a chance, so I’m very frustrated with myself to not even hit the target. That was a sleepless night last night because I know that a lot of fans and the people on the team want me to have that chance.
“But the development we’ve shown from the first game where everyone’s not really sure what we’re doing in the competition and a little bit nervous, to putting in performances like that only three games later is really positive.”
Biereth ran across Emre Can for his chance in the second half. The German international was playing centre-back alongside Nico Schlotterbeck, and although Biereth had tough times training against Arsenal’s Gabriel Magalhaes, this duo was like no other he has faced as a professional so far.
“Schlotterbeck could be one of the best I’ve played against in a real game,” he says. “Just in terms of everything on the ball. So calm and composed, doing all sorts of passes across the pitch, really quick and really firm in tackles.
“You see a lot in the media about how Emre Can’s getting old and slow, maybe he’s not as good as he used to be, but I can tell you, playing against him he looked perfectly fine to me. He’s still able to play out of position at centre-back, be comfortable on the ball and defend really well.”
Dortmund’s winner on the night came from former Arsenal youth striker Donyell Malen. Similar to Biereth, Malen did not make a single competitive appearance for Arsenal but has still had a career many would be proud of. He left Arsenal for PSV in 2017 and scored 55 goals for the Dutch side before moving to Dortmund in 2021. He has scored 38 and assisted 20 goals since that move and has been part of the Netherlands’ last two European Championship squads.
Malen’s strike may have caused Biereth agony in the short term, but on the fellow former-Arsenal forward possibly serving as an inspiration, Biereth says: “Yeah, there are loads of situations like that, not just from Arsenal but other academies where you leave at a younger age when people don’t feel like you’re quite ready for the first team and you go get experiences elsewhere. Then you show a couple of years later that you probably were ready.
“Making it at Arsenal isn’t the be-all and end-all of someone’s career. There are many ways of having a successful career outside of Arsenal.”
The reality is that Biereth does not have to look as far as Malen as a point of inspiration for that.
His secondary school, Whitgift in south Croydon, has been churning out examples across sports before his time and during it. Former England rugby union star Danny Cipriani is an alumnus whose image was hung up at the school, while Victor Moses and Callum Hudson-Odoi are older footballing examples of players who have found success away from the academies they were raised in.
The forward’s most contemporary example comes from someone born just 18 days after him, however.
He met Jamal Musiala on a trial for Chelsea’s academy before joining Fulham’s setup, and the pair reunited at Whitgift School, and have been friends since. Musiala’s journey took him from Chelsea to Bayern Munich at 16, and at 21 he is continuing to light up the Bundesliga after running Euro 2024.
Biereth’s journey is different, and he is still getting to grips with learning German while in Austria, but he has found his feet quickly after saying goodbye to Arsenal.
(Top photo by Jurij Kodrun via Getty Images)
