Around the time the false nine became fashionable, a lot of people concluded that the traditional centre-forward was finished. Too static, too one-dimensional, useless against a high line, and unable to participate in the kind of possession football that everyone had decided was the future.
Then a generation of forwards arrived who are six foot four, win everything in the air, and also run 35 kilometres an hour. The target man didn't die. He got an athletic upgrade and quietly became one of the most valuable profiles in the sport.
What the job always was
Worth being precise about what a target man actually does, because the caricature is a lump who stands still and waits for crosses.
The real job has three parts. Receive long or direct passes under pressure and retain them, so the team has an escape route. Occupy centre-backs so they can't step out into midfield. And attack crosses and second balls in the box.
All three of those are as valuable now as they've ever been. The high press means every team needs an out-ball. Compact defences mean crosses and second-phase attacks matter. And centre-backs stepping into midfield is a bigger part of build-up than it was, which makes occupying them more valuable, not less.
Nothing about modern football made these things obsolete. What changed was the additional requirements bolted on top.
What got added
Four things, roughly, and together they explain why the profile looked briefly extinct.
Pressing. A forward who doesn't press is a defensive liability at any level above about the fifth tier. That immediately excluded a whole generation of big, slow, technically decent centre-forwards who'd been perfectly employable ten years earlier.
Running in behind. Modern attacking play needs somebody stretching the defensive line. A striker who only comes short lets the defence push up and compress the pitch.
Combination play. Receiving to feet and laying off first time to a runner, then spinning into the box. That's a technical requirement that the old model didn't always demand.
Finishing from limited chances. Because teams create fewer, better opportunities now, a striker who needs six chances to score one is a problem in a way he wasn't when teams created twenty.
The players who could do all four while also being 190cm and dominant in the air simply didn't exist in large numbers, and for a while it looked like you had to choose.
The physical shift
What happened next is one of the more interesting developments in modern football and it's mostly a sports science story.
Academy training changed. Big teenagers who would previously have been developed as target men, with an emphasis on strength and heading, started being developed as athletes first — speed work, acceleration, change of direction — and technical work second, with size treated as a bonus rather than a role definition.
The result is a cohort of forwards who are genuinely enormous and genuinely fast, which used to be a contradiction. Combine that with better nutrition and much better strength and conditioning, and the trade-off between size and mobility narrowed considerably.
They're not target men in the old sense. They're complete forwards who happen to be very tall, which turns out to be the best possible thing to be.
Why height matters more than people admit
There's been a slight embarrassment about aerial ability in tactical discourse — it reads as primitive. That's silly and the numbers don't support it.
Crosses are still a substantial share of chance creation in most leagues. Set pieces account for something like a quarter to a third of goals depending on the competition. Long balls are the standard escape from a press. All of these reward height.
And there's a defensive dimension people forget. A tall striker who can defend corners at the near post frees a defender to do something else, which matters over a season.
The reason the aerial game got downplayed is that for a period, teams that relied entirely on it were bad. That's true. It doesn't follow that aerial ability is worthless as one component of a complete forward.
The version that still doesn't work
To be fair to the false-nine enthusiasts, one version of the target man genuinely is extinct and won't return.
The forward who is only a target — who can't press, can't run in behind, can't play a one-two, and exists to receive long balls and knock them down — is unemployable at any serious level. Teams simply won't carry a player who is a passenger in three phases out of four.
You still see them in lower divisions and they still score goals there, because the defending is worse and the crossing volume is higher. But the pathway upwards from that profile has closed.
What to look for
If you're assessing a big forward, the aerial numbers are the least useful thing. Almost every tall striker wins a decent share of his headers.
The questions that separate them: how many high-intensity sprints per ninety, and are they in the right directions. How often does he receive with his back to goal and successfully retain. What's his shot volume from inside the six-yard box, which tells you whether he's arriving in the right places rather than just being big.
And, honestly, how does he look after seventy minutes. The physical demands of the modern version of this role are brutal, and the difference between a good one and a great one is often just whether he's still doing it in the last twenty minutes.