Arsenal dodged a bullet with Vinicius Jr – he was always doomed to disappoint
He’s one of the world’s highest-rated attackers, a 26-year-old with almost 450 professional games to his name, 252 goal involvements, and nearly won the Ballon d’Or in 2024.
Add that to last year’s Premier League winners, who boast Europe’s best defence, one of England’s best midfielders, but whose only minor Achilles heel protrudes from their left flank.
Vinicius Jr to Arsenal was a match (expensively) made in heaven.
It’s exactly what the rightfully greedy football fan wants. You start spending money precisely when you’re at the top, to consolidate your position and leave your competitors with too much work to do to catch up.
Speaking on The Athletic podcast in July, renowned journalist Adam Crafton said: “I will say on Arsenal, I had a conversation maybe in May with someone who is incredibly well connected in European football, who said that talk of people he was speaking to is that Arsenal were ready to do some seriously disruptive business this summer, in terms of taking the team from where they were up to that next level.”
Seriously disruptive business.
It’s the sort of short phrase that widens the eyes of transfer junkies, and landing Vini Jr would be comfortably deserving of the label.
At this point in the life cycle of a transfer rumour, you head to your favourite stats site and see he’s scored over 20 goals in all competitions in his last five seasons, four of those after playing over 50 games. No injury concerns.
Then you glance through Mikel Arteta’s squad. Gabriel. Martinelli. Jesus. Bruno Guimaraes has just signed. This Brazilian’s going to fit right in here.
You realise you’re getting giddy, so you go and check what the Spanish media are saying. He’s rejected two contract renewals at Madrid.
I’m building to a big crescendo here, but you already know what I think. You’ve read the headline. It wouldn’t have worked. It was too big.
This is where I’d like to launch into a technical explanation about why these mega deals don’t work, but the truth is, there is just something intangibly, inherently doomed about them.
Seriously, look down the list of the most expensive deals football has witnessed.
Neymar and Kylian Mbappe top the list, costing Paris Saint-Germain a combined £353,740,000. Yes, they scored a hatful of goals in the French capital, but we all know a Champions League trophy was the driving force behind that immense outlay.
Two did arrive – in the years following Mbappe’s exit, with Neymar having departed a year prior.
Ousmane Dembele is next up, costing Barcelona £129.68m in a blockbuster move after a showstopping one season at Borussia Dortmund.
He departed in 2023, and an ESPN headline from that summer succinctly rounds up his time in Catalonia.
“Barcelona are better without Dembele’s unfulfilled potential”.
The premise was bang on at the time, but fast-forward two years later, the Frenchman would be taking centre stage at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, clutching a Ballon d’Or.
His move to PSG 24 months early had cost a much more sedate £43.5m.
Arsenal themselves know this sorry tale all too well, with Nicolas Pepe’s ill-fated £72m back in 2019 never living up to the hype.
As a basement-dwelling writer, I’ll never quite understand how these galactic, earth-shattering deals weigh on the human at the centre of them, but it has to at least be a factor in such a high failure rate. Or maybe the mind-boggling sums of money involved just mean the product could never live up to expectations.
Either way, evidence points towards Vini Jr at increased risk of being next, had he rocked up in north London.
Yes, the Brazilian was heading into the last year of his contract at Madrid, but the transfer market is Los Blancos’ second sport. It feels as though, backed up by the contract offer they eventually put in front of Vini, they’d sooner have had him for an extra year and see him leave for nothing, rather than let him go for anything less than a significant sum this summer.
Real are not a selling club. Of that top 100 most expensive players list mentioned earlier, they feature as sellers just four times. Ronaldo to Juventus, Angel Di Maria and Casemiro to Manchester United, and Alvaro Morata to Chelsea. Some worked out well, but you’d say they got the better end of the bargain on the whole.
They don’t sell their best, and Vini Jr is one of them, so the King’s club would have demanded a king’s ransom.
With the ink now dry on the Brazilian’s new six-year contract at the Bernabeu, we’ll never know what the figures involved might have been.
However, just 18 months prior, reports in the Sun suggested that Real would only begin to consider offers near the player’s £830m release clause – a figure interested parties in Saudi Arabia were clearly pondering, given the same report revealed officials in the Middle East had thrown together a proposal that would see Vini earn £168m per year.
Arsenal, of course, would have been nowhere near these numbers – neither are Madrid – but it illustrates some of the bargaining power his agents have.
The Gunners, according to The Athletic, were willing to “break their wage structure” for the winger, with an offer they felt Madrid couldn’t match. A more realistic sum than that on the table in Saudi is the offer finally accepted by Vinicius. The figures have been kept private, but from the same report we know it’s more than the £18,813,300-per-year offer that was turned down last.
That means paying significantly more than £361,794 per week, after tax.
Baked in with the cost of the transfer fee itself, and any agent’s fees, what would Vini have had to produce to make that worthwhile? Would one Champions League have been enough? For it to scorch all wage structures and future negotiations that lay before it?
And that’s not to mention the wider narratives – what would it have meant for the likes of Max Dowman‘s progression? What message would it send to the rest of the academy if a talent like that is blocked further each season in the market?
Vini Jr. to Arsenal was always doomed to fail, because almost nothing is worth what it would have cost in the long run.
