Ekitike makes dream start with opening goal of Premier League season | OneFootball

Hugo Ekitike scored the very first goal of the 2025/26 Premier League season, joining the select group of players who’ve opened a campaign with the initial strike.

The breakthrough came in the 37th minute, when he collected Alexis Mac Allister’s pass. A deflection off Marcos Senesi sent the ball back into his path, and the Frenchman coolly side-footed it into the net.

Not long after the interval, Ekitike turned provider. In the 49th minute he slipped the ball to Cody Gakpo, who cut inside from the left and tucked his shot into the bottom-right corner to put Liverpool two up.

That made Ekitike only the second Liverpool player to both score and assist on his Premier League debut, the first being Darwin Núñez against Fulham in August 2022.

He’s also the fifth French player to net the opening goal of a Premier League season, and the first to do so since Paul Pogba back in 2018.

For Liverpool, Ekitike follows in the footsteps of Stig Inge Bjørnebye (1996), Djibril Cissé (2004), Luis Suárez (2011) and Daniel Sturridge (2013) as players to notch the campaign’s opener (with Grant Hanley’s own goal in 2019/20 not counted).