Late evening post from me because the news hitting the feeds is that personal terms have been agreed by Vini Jnr.
🚨 EXCL: Arsenal Football Club have personal terms agreed in principle with VinÃcius Júnior. Roc Nation will go armed into negotiations with Real Madrid with a monstrous offer from the English Champions……. over to you VinÃcius Júnior.
The streets said Hand of Arsenal was finished, but his resurrection this summer has hit harder than Jesus at Easter.
Just think back 7 years, when Arsenal were in the death throes of the banter era… now imagine someone told you then that in 2026 Arsenal would be loading up the best left winger in the world with a massive offer they were going to use to bully Real Madrid.
Quite extraordinary. We have no idea what the reaction will be, whether Madrid can compete for it, whether they even want this to happen… but we do know we’re in the mixer.
What would be interesting to know is how much of this deal is predicated on image rights vs the base pay. Vini, as it stands, takes 50% of his image rights, but the rumblings are that those image rights are so rich, the part that Madrid owns covers the entire Vini Jnr salary.
Arsenal offering Vini 100% of his image rights is quite the kickback.
His base salary varies depending on where you look. Some say £410k a week, others put it at about £280k a week, I’m guessing that it’s closer to the lower number. If he moves to Arsenal, are we going to put him on the same salary as Saka to keep him in our pay structure, but give him the extra £17m to £25m a year in image rights?
Or… are we also going to smash our pay structure and make him a true mega star of the league. I can’t quite work out what the plan is there. If Arsenal reflect a £20m pay rise, that’s quite a lot, but unless we’re going mega on the salary, we’re opening ourselves up to competition for his signature… even though I have looked at that and can’t see many openings in the league that would suit his brand.
Man City? They already bought Monga.
Not sure Vini Jnr feels like a Liverpool player.
Chelsea aren’t at the level.
Not really anyone else, is there?
The whole thing is delicious, but we do have to remember, this is still very much a play to flush out the intentions of Real Madrid.
It’s a ‘do you really love me’ move… and we know Vini Jnr loves Madrid. The question is, do Madrid want to break their pay structure and their image rights approach for someone that might cost them Haaland and Olise next summer?
I have a feeling Madrid might just… sell him. This is unprecedented behaviour for a Madrid superstar. This is disruptive. It is precedent-setting. It has made the Spanish club look like they are not controlling the narrative. They have their ‘look at how ungrateful this guy is’ story… and deep down, they know Haaland will feel newer and fresher. The nuclear option is rarely the right move… even in business, when someone comes with a mega offer to me, I usually let them go, because their head is already in another job and when you renew, that’s never the end of the story. It rarely lasts longer than a year, then everyone else in the workforce knows they can bully you.
Madrid sit at the top of the food chain, no one bullies them.
The potency of optics and their lust for the new could work in our favour… but as you know, I gaslight myself on subjects like these, and I am naturally toxic positive.
This story is so dominant right now, it’s had me ignoring the Bruno G story. Well, the French press is now reporting that a fee of about £70m has been agreed or will be agreed, and the Brazilian monster will be an Arsenal player before the start of the season. Quite the coup. You really have to feel for the Telegraph journalist who self-immolated on the timeline, insisting that Newcastle, a club that sells all its stars, would absolutely not sell this star… I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a sports writer take a transfer so personally… good online entertainment though.
Here’s a tidied version, corrections only, structure and voice untouched, no em dashes:
Final piece: it became very clear why Infantino invented a Peace Prize and spent extraordinary amounts of time with the President of the United States. He was leaning into his family ties to sell off parts of the World Cup’s commercial rights.
The gist: put FIFA’s commercial business into a $20 billion entity, then sell 20% to Thrive Capital (Kushner aligned), to raise $4.2 billion for FIFA. He then went to bribe all 211 FIFA nations with $40m each to back the plan. All kinds of ghastly, but mostly ridiculous, because FIFA doesn’t need the money.
The Arsenal interest here is that Arsene Wenger works for FIFA, and he’s not spoken out about it or resigned. Quite incredible that a man who built his legacy on integrity to a fault hasn’t had a look at this and wondered if his reputation might be tarnished by standing by something more toxic than the Super League.
The good news is UEFA has all its nations whipped into agreeing they’d boycott this disgusting plan, and they’ve now formally voted on it, not just threatened it. Carlos Cordeiro, a former Goldman Sachs banker who was advising Infantino, has bounced, saying he had no involvement in the proposal and opposes it unequivocally. CONCACAF has also said they won’t go along with the plan. At this point it’s dead on arrival, and I cannot imagine Infantino survives this flaming bonfire of a scandal. Quite tough to sink to levels so grim you lose your job at an organization that kind of bakes a little corruption into the job.
Hopefully the bigger associations put pressure on him to resign, and after he goes, there’s a proper restructure and a rethink on how things are done. I really don’t care that much about international football, so apologies for not having something a little more full-throated. I’m just too hyped on Vini to care.
Anyway, good times for Arsenal, right? See you in the comments. I’m having fun. x