Vitão

According to Marca, we are close to signing the young Brazilian CB and according to Globo, Palmeiras Football director Alexandre Mattos was in Europe trying to find suitors for the young CB with Barcelona being one of the major clubs being interested.

We have been following how around for a while now going by previous rumors I've found. He was in the same Brazil U-20 team with Emerson.

I was just about to make a thread about him.

Timing of this signing is a bit strange because we can't register him. Maybe he'll stay on loan at Palmeiras until summer.

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He dances.

New Mina.

Yerry Jr.

Are we starting a side business of signing and hoarding young CBs for resale later?

Luftstalag14 said:

Are we starting a side business of signing and hoarding young CBs for resale later?

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Guess the idea is trying to buy young talent for cheap and hopes one of them works out and if not we sell them for a profit.

I think we should be looking at Fullbacks the most IMO. Since it's getting harder and harder to find good enough Fullbacks especially RBs. I'm pretty impressed with Wague though with the B team so far and we joint bought Emerson with Betis as well.

Wingers, please.

From a mathematical point of view, buying Cbs is more lucrative than buying Rbs, since all clubs in the world play with 2 Cbs and 1 Rb.

Regarding wingers, young Brasilians cost 40-50m, while these young Cbs cost 5-10m.

After Mina and Marlon, as predicted, our board figured out that young Cbs are a gold mine and an easy win-win.
If a player will be awesome=we'll get a starter.
If a player will be ok-ish=we'll sell him with a profit.
If a player will be bad=we'll sell him for the same amount for which we have bought him more or less.

If we are looking for another Militao or Gabriel Paulista (yeah I know, not Barca quality but commended a few good transfer fees in Europe) then this guy might not be it.

I cant find any data that he has played for Palmeiras so not a good sign there. Although he was captain for the recent U20 Brasil team so he might be OK.

Since 2016 we'we bought:

for Barça B:

- Marlon 5M
- Bueno 1M
- Cuenca 400k
- Araujo 1,7M
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Total 8,1M.

Then we also signed some (a bit older) players like David Costas and Hongla on loan with buy option we didn't use. We surely paid loan fee for them but don't know how much. The same for Marlon's first year on loan at Barça B. But let's say total transfer+loan fees for those players were around 10M.

Bueno is on loan at Girona B and his contract expires in summer. It's probably safe to assume he's a failed experiment.

Cuenca and Araujo are part of CB rotation in Barça B with Chumi and Mingueza. Cuenca has also renewed his contract till 2021 last week. Don't know what future plans are for them but I think Cuenca could play in La Liga in a year or two so we'll probably loan/sell with buy back to some midtable club. I didn't see enough of Araujo so far but hopefully we can do the same.

We've sold Marlon for 6M which could raise to 12M if he plays 50 games for Sassuolo (he played 17 so far). If they sell him we get 50% of transfer fee or we can bring him back (to sell him for even more but that's unlikely to happen).


First team:
- Mina 11,8M
- Todibo 1M
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Total 12,8M

I'm not counting Umtiti and Lenglet here because they were bought with a clear first team role in mind or Murillo who was just an emergency short-term signing.

Mina was sold for around 30M and we still don't know what we have in Todibo.


So in total we've spend around 23M to "gamble" on CB talents. And we've sold Mina and Marlon for around 36M which could go up to 40-45M (additional fee for Marlon, possibly some money for Cuenca and Araujo). I'm not counting Todibo because I hope he actually makes it here but if not we'll probably make at least a few millions profit with him.

I know Mina is an exception and his price was inflated because of the WC. We won't sell most players for a big gain but I still like this philosophy. If 1 out of the 10 players will prove to be good enough to be at least a squad player for a few years and we can sell another player or two to cover financially for the rest 6 or 7 (who will more or less fail) players I would take that.

I don't know how much Vitao will cost but it will probably be somewhere between Marlon (5M) and Mina (12M). If he'll make it here longterm great. If not I would be happy to get a Marlon like deal for him in a year or two and if we can get anywhere close to Mina's fee it would be fantastic. Obviously he could also totally fail and we'll have to hope that one of the future gamblings (if we'll continue this philosophy) will paid off more and cover for whatever money we'd lose with Vitao.

Very smart business. Very low risk with potentially a massive reward.

wisconsincule said:

Very smart business. Very low risk with potentially a massive reward.

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I agree. Very smart from Barca.

This guy hasnt even played in the Brazilian top division. I cant recall our scouting department ever managing to find a gem that way before.
If we try to get the best CB in the Brazilian top division who is also very young and highly coveted (hypothetically), I'm sure we'd have to splash 30m.

I think people get abit overboard because of Yerry Mina who was unique because of his WC goals.

Jombi said:

This guy hasnt even played in the Brazilian top division. I cant recall our scouting department ever managing to find a gem that way before.
If we try to get the best CB in the Brazilian top division who is also very young and highly coveted (hypothetically), I'm sure we'd have to splash 30m.

I think people get abit overboard because of Yerry Mina who was unique because of his WC goals.

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Marlon had hardly played for fluminense. I think our scouts are more focused on Brazil U20 team than the first divison

like others pointed out, its an easy way to make profit

abiabi said:

Marlon had hardly played for fluminense. I think our scouts are more focused on Brazil U20 team than the first divison

like others pointed out, its an easy way to make profit

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Marlon actually played over 50+ First team games for Fluminense to be fair.

I get what you're saying with Vitao though. Seems like we are putting a lot of focus on finding talent in Brazil's U-20 teams.