2023/24 factor shows Exeter City supporters can't turn nose up at new arrival: View | OneFootball

Josh Magennis can offer Exeter City so much more than just goals.

Highlights

St James Park was not the place to be in 2023/24 if free-flowing, attacking football's your thing.

Exeter City averaged just a goal a game scored (46 in 46) with only six teams fairing worse across the whole campaign.

All of those finished in the bottom seven and three went down. It’s a small miracle, then, that City enjoyed a roller-coaster ride to 13th in League One.

There are plenty of solid building blocks at Exeter but attack remains the key area for improvement. Sonny Cox is full of talent and the 19-year-old academy product returned a different player from his short loan spell at Yeovil, plundering five goals in 35 appearances.

James Scott came and went with his confidence shot to pieces thanks to a chorus of boos and three goals in 25 appearances while loanee Ryan Trevitt equaled cente-back Will Aimson’s haul of five and Luke Harris got four towards the end of the season before heading back to parent club Fulham.

Mo Eisa flattered to deceive and scored only that long-range deflected goal at Wigan before being quietly sidelined with no chance of his loan becoming permanent.

The big ray of light was Millenic Alli’s four in the final four games of the season after shaking off the injury that delayed his debut after arriving from FC Halifax in January.

Solving Exeter City's goal-scoring problem

So, how’s Gary Caldwell going to fix this in 2024/25 then? Well, the Grecians have made attacking reinforcements already this summer with Josh Magennis heading to the West Country on a free transfer and Jay Bird signing from Arbroath.

Caldwell has already indicated that Bird is a long-term project but Magennis is clearly here to play, and to play from the off, with regular football a big factor in potentially extending his international career up to 100 caps.

The arrival of the Northern Irishman at St James Park has been met with a mixed response but, given a run in the team, the signs are that he’ll get a few goals.

He only started 14 League One games for Wigan in 2023/24 but he managed eight goals 39 appearances across all competitions for the Tics.

Throughout the league campaign, in which he scored seven times, he played a total of 1,350 minutes, an average of 37.5 minutes per appearance.

Reece Cole's Exeter goal record is impressive from midfield

To give that some context, City’s top scorer in 2023/24, Reece Cole, got seven goals from midfield in 39 appearances including 30 starts across 2,669 minutes. An average of just over 68 minutes per appearance, almost double that of Magennis’ total.

While a return of seven goals for the experienced forward may be a little underwhelming, especially given City’s desperate need for potent firepower, he averaged a goal every 199 minutes in League One as Wigan's captain last season.

In other words, that’s just over a goal every other game.

Now, the big question is, can Magennis play 90 minutes every week? That remains to be seen.

He only played the full 90 once in his last 10 appearances for Wigan and will turn 34 two days before City’s second league game of the season at Northampton on August 17th, so you suspect not.

While strikers live and die by their goal records, Magennis has clearly been brought in for more than that and his status as Tics captain last term cannot be ignored in the bigger picture.

What Josh Magennis can bring to Exeter City

The experience that he can pass on to the likes of Cox and Alli as an international player who’s played in the Scottish Premiership and the EFL Championship for years will be vital in their development.

Cox, in particular, can benefit greatly, and he’ll do well to soak up every bit of advice from a man who fired 18 goals in Hull’s 2020/21 promotion campaign.

The former Charlton and Bolton man is not going to be running in behind and breaking the lines, he’s there to hold it up, bring others in to play, and know where to be in the box for those countless cutbacks from the byline that we saw endlessly cleared last season.

Magennis may not be the last forward to head to EX4 this summer but he’ll surely play a key part.

You fancy he’s been lured to Devon with the promise of regular first-team football and, given a run, he can surely better that sven from last season by some distance.

If you’re still not convinced by the Magennis signing, just think how useful he would have been last season.

If he can grab close to 10 goals this term he'll easily be an improvement on the attacking options in the 2023/24 campaign and the numbers suggest he's got a good chance of doing so.