Dublin in early August is not where verdicts get written, and everyone connected with the club will tell you that before you've finished your first sentence about it. Preseason friendlies exist to find fitness, not form, and Arsenal's flat, laboured, sideways afternoon there told you less about the season ahead than about jet lag and conditioning schedules. Except it also told you something true, which is that this squad, as constituted, still has holes a marquee name doesn't fill. You could see it in the hesitation on the ball, the missing second and third option when the first one broke down. Arteta watched it from the touchline and afterwards talked about needing "better individuals" — plural, not a system tweak, not a formation — which is as close as a manager gets to admitting the cupboard has gaps in more than one place.

The case for Vinicius Jr deserves stating properly before it gets knocked down. He is twenty-six, in the form of his career, a difference-maker who terrifies full-backs and drags matches into a different register on his own. He has one year left on his Real Madrid contract, precisely the kind of leverage point that turns impossible transfers into merely improbable ones, because Madrid do not want to watch him walk for nothing next summer. Arsenal's financial proposal reportedly already exceeds whatever Madrid have put on the table. If the money is there and the timing is right, you take the swing. Nobody sensible disputes that a fit, motivated Vinicius Jr makes any front four better.

The trouble is that "if" is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence, and every week that passes adds another clause to it. Real Madrid have gone back to the table with what's been described as a final offer, built around the sort of renewal bonus that would put Vinicius in the Mbappé bracket of the wage structure, which is the exact demand that has stuck the negotiation for months. Vinicius, by every account, still wants to stay. He has dreamed of finishing his career there, or at least of not being the player who left the way Ronaldo left, and Florentino Pérez remains his biggest backer inside the building. Arsenal are the insurance policy, not the plan. Talks scheduled to bring the matter to a head are the sound of two parties still very much not agreed, in the second week of August, with Mourinho publicly fretting about a player who hasn't reported for preseason and is delayed well past his mandatory time off.

That is not a transfer that resolves itself quickly, and it is not one Arsenal can control the pace of. Every week Edu's team spends managing it — matching figures, waiting on Madrid's internal politics, keeping the proposal warm in case Vinicius's hand finally gets forced — is a week not spent on the specific, nameable gaps Dublin exposed. A fee in the £150-170m range, even split across windows, is not money you can also spend on a defensive midfielder or cover in behind the front line. Recruitment doesn't run on a queue where you wait for the glamour deal to resolve before turning to the boring ones. It runs on windows that shut in early September, and on comparable clubs who are not waiting for anybody.

I keep a private ledger on windows like this one, and the gap between what the club wants supporters to feel and what actually needs feeling is instructive. The instinct the pursuit is designed to produce is excitement: Vinicius Jr, real superstar, real statement of intent, a name that trends before it signs anything. What the ground actually needs, after Dublin, is boring competence — bodies that mean Arteta isn't reaching for the same six names every time somebody pulls a hamstring in October.

Bruno Guimarães arriving is the kind of signing nobody cuts a highlight reel out of and everybody notices missing in March.

None of this means walk away from Vinicius Jr on principle; a discount version of him, forced out by Madrid's stubbornness over a bonus structure, would be a serious upgrade for any club in Europe, Arsenal included. It means recognising that a chase built on somebody else's contract dispute is a bet on other people's decisions, and it should never be allowed to consume the attention and capital the actual, visible, Dublin-shaped gaps in this squad require. Arteta said he needs better individuals, plural. Real Madrid, so far, have given Arsenal exactly one name to chase and a summer's worth of reasons to keep waiting.