Wilfried Bony: the 31-goal season that changed everything

The season: Vitesse, 2012–13

Bony had already shown promise at Sparta Prague, where he helped the club to the Czech First League title in 2009–10, and in his first full season at Vitesse Arnhem he'd topped the club's scoring charts. But nothing prepared the Eredivisie for 2012–13.

He scored on the opening weekend against ADO Den Haag, then kept going: a 90th-minute winner over Feyenoord, a hat-trick in a thriller against Heerenveen, two goals in an upset win at Ajax's own ground, Vitesse's first victory there since 2001, and a run of scoring in nine consecutive matches that included twice coming off the back of Africa Cup of Nations duty and still finding the net against PSV. He finished the campaign with 31 goals in 30 matches, enough to be named the Eredivisie's top scorer and win the Golden Shoe as the best player in the Netherlands.

It was the kind of season a smaller club dreams a forward will produce once, and it made Bony's next move inevitable.

What it bought him

Swansea City paid a club-record £12 million to sign him that summer, and the form largely travelled with him. He scored 25 goals in his first Premier League season, a tally that included a header at Old Trafford that gave Swansea their first-ever win there, and he was the division's top scorer across the calendar year of 2014. He went to the World Cup with Ivory Coast that summer and scored twice in the group stage.

That form carried him to Manchester City in January 2015 for a fee that could rise to £28 million, at the time, the most expensive transfer involving an African footballer. He won the League Cup with City in 2015–16 and helped Ivory Coast win the Africa Cup of Nations that same year, scoring twice in the quarter-final and taking a penalty in the final shoot-out.

What happened next

At City, though, he could not hold down a regular place, and the arrival of Pep Guardiola as manager in 2016 ended any prospect of one, Bony was made available for transfer. A season-long loan at Stoke City followed, but he went seven games without scoring, fell out of favour with manager Mark Hughes, and later described being left out of the squad as a "crazy situation."

Swansea brought him back for a second spell in 2017, paying another £12 million, and he captained the side to a win over West Brom that December. But goals dried up for player and club alike, Bony suffered an ankle injury in what turned out to be his last Swansea appearance, and the club were relegated. A loan to Qatar's Al-Arabi followed, then release in 2019.

From there the career scattered rather than continued: a brief, aborted stint at Saudi club Al-Ittihad that ended by mutual agreement after ten months; a return to the Netherlands with NEC Nijmegen in 2022 that amounted to a single 15-minute appearance, with injuries keeping him out for most of the rest; and finally, in 2023, a move to Bolivia's Always Ready, making him the first Ivorian to play professionally in the country.

The 2012–13 season remains the single clearest marker of what Bony was capable of, and the rest of his career is the long record of a player who never quite recreated it, even while the big move it earned him kept paying dividends for a while longer.