On Sky Sports on 3 August, Jack Wilshere was midway through a perfectly sensible answer about Declan Rice needing a rest and Bruno Guimaraes being the kind of player he enjoys watching, the sort who might genuinely add something under Arteta's coaching. He hadn't finished the thought. The interviewer cut across him: I tell you who else might be a top signing — Vinicius Junior ends up in the Premier League at Arsenal, how big a deal would that be? Wilshere, game as ever, said yes, it would be. Of course he did. Everybody says yes to that question this summer, and nobody finishes the sentence about Bruno Guimaraes.

That, in miniature, is the problem, and it isn't really about Vinicius Junior at all.

What Arsenal are doing, in the plain reporting of it, is serious and considered. Andrea Berta has held talks with Vinicius's camp. The club regard him as their priority target and their interest in Bradley Barcola has cooled accordingly. Ownership have approved figures that would make him one of the two highest earners in the Premier League, second only to Erling Haaland, and Real Madrid — offering €22m a year against his demand for €30m — appear unwilling to move. None of that is froth. It is a financed, football-driven pursuit of a player Arteta reportedly loves, and the man himself, asked about it after beating Girona, simply laughed and thanked the press. Good discipline. You don't get drawn into a transfer saga you don't control.

The strongest case for the pursuit shouldn't be waved away: there are very few players alive who add a genuinely new dimension to a title-chasing side, and Vinicius, a two-time Champions League winner and the 2024 FIFA Best Men's Player, is one of them. Landing him would be, by the common description now attached to it, the most ambitious signing in the club's history, bigger even than Ozil in 2013. It would tell the rest of the division that Arsenal are no longer window-shopping at that level of the market. All of that is true, and none of it answers the question of what the pursuit costs while it is still just a pursuit.

Arsenal have done this dance before, and the record is instructive precisely because everyone remembers it wrong. In the summer of 2013 the whole of English football spent weeks talking about Luis Suarez, about the £40,000,001 bid triggered off his release clause, deliberately a pound over to be cheeky, about Liverpool's fury and the daily circus that followed. Arsenal fans that August were not calm. They were anxious, and rightly so, because the team had gone a full season without a trophy and the summer's one marquee pursuit was collapsing in real time. What actually happened is that Suarez stayed, and on deadline day, almost as an afterthought to a saga that had eaten the whole window, Arsenal signed Mesut Ozil for £42.5m instead. The memory files that summer under triumph, because Ozil turned out to be exactly the coup Vinicius would be. The memory does not file it under what it actually was, which was months of a squad and a fan base fixated on a deal that never happened, while the deal that did happen arrived with nine hours left on the clock.

None of this means Vinicius will be this year's Suarez, a distraction that resolves into nothing. He might arrive. Real's refusal to meet his wage demands is a genuine opening, and personal terms were reportedly close as of 1 August. But the structural risk underneath the pursuit is not hypothetical, and it is visible in this squad right now. Christos Tzolis has already been signed, a sensible, unglamorous piece of business, while Gabriel Jesus and Gabriel Martinelli are both expected to leave the Emirates this summer. That is two departing forwards and one incoming one, with the hole meant to be filled, in the club's own stated priority order, by the most expensive and complicated transfer in its history. If it lands, the arithmetic works. If it doesn't, Arsenal go into a title defence thinner up front than they started it, having spent a summer's attention on a deal that Real Madrid, not Arsenal, ultimately controlled.

Arteta's language around this has been about wanting better individuals to take the group to the next level, which is true as far as it goes, but it is also the sentence every manager reaches for when the alternative — patiently building a spine out of players already at the club, promoting from an academy that has produced very little first-team output in recent seasons — sounds slower and less exciting to say out loud in a press conference. Ozil didn't fix Arsenal by himself in 2013. He arrived into a squad already rebuilt around Aaron Ramsey's breakout season, and the FA Cup that followed in May 2014 owed at least as much to players who'd been there through the barren years as to the record signing.

The manager laughing off a question after Girona is the same instinct Arsene Wenger had in August 2013: let the noise happen elsewhere. What decides whether this summer is remembered as Ozil or as Suarez won't be settled by the size of the fee. It'll be settled by what Arsenal have left in the building if the answer, again, turns out to be no.