Ten clearances in ninety minutes, one interception, no goals conceded — that was William Saliba's afternoon against Paraguay on Saturday 4 July, the game that put France into the World Cup quarter-final and put Saliba, again, in front of the whole football world with a number next to his name that made pundits reach for the word "masterful." It was the highest clearance count of his tournament, in a defence that has now kept Sweden and Iraq scoreless too. The instinct, watching it, is to reach for the phone and start typing something about Real Madrid.

That instinct has history behind it, and history is worth taking seriously before you dismiss it. Cesc Fàbregas won the World Cup with Spain in July 2010, spent a further season captaining Arsenal with visible restlessness, and was at Barcelona by August 2011. The pattern is real. A tournament turns a very good club player into a name every director of football in Europe has now watched for six straight matches, and clubs that were merely curious become clubs that call. Robin van Persie gets cited in the same breath, though the comparison strains a little on inspection. He left in 2012 with a year to run on his contract and had told Arsenal as much before that summer's Euros even started, which is a man walking out the door rather than a man being lured through it. Fàbregas is the cleaner precedent. Saliba, at this World Cup, is doing something closer to what Fàbregas did in 2010: making himself, in the space of a month, undeniable.

And the suitors will be real, because they always are. A twenty-five-year-old centre-back who starts every knockout game for France, who has just won Arsenal's first league title in twenty-two years and taken them to a Champions League final decided on penalties by Paris Saint-Germain, is not a secret to anyone with a scouting budget. If Real Madrid or PSG themselves came calling with a number attached, nobody at the Emirates would be shocked, and nobody should pretend the market doesn't work that way.

Here is where the record, rather than the mood, matters. Saliba's contract at Arsenal runs to 2028. That is the entire difference between his situation and Fàbregas's in 2010, when the Spaniard was down to two years and had spent the preceding season making his preference for Barcelona a matter of public record in interviews the Emirates crowd did not enjoy reading. Saliba has said nothing of the kind. What he told ESPN before the Iraq match was this: "I've had some minor niggles for several months. I've been gritting my teeth because there was the Champions League and the Premier League… The World Cup comes round only once every four years, so you've got to grit your teeth. I'm not at 100%, but there are plenty of players who aren't at 100% either — you can't make excuses." That is not the language of a man auditioning for an exit. It is the language of a man who spent May playing through pain to finish a job at Arsenal, then went straight to France duty to finish another one.

There is a structural point that gets lost in tournament excitement. Every World Cup produces exactly this article, about somebody. Somebody's contract always looks short, somebody's form always looks irresistible, and by August the actual movement is almost always among players who were already unsettled before a ball was kicked — Fàbregas in 2011, not the dozens of other World Cup winners who went back to their clubs and stayed for years. The panic is the tradition. It survives its own false alarms every four years and nobody ever writes the retraction.

None of which means Arsenal should be relaxed about the next eighteen months. Big clubs test resolve with numbers, and Saliba's stock, after Sweden, Iraq and Paraguay, is higher now than at any point since he arrived from Saint-Étienne in 2019 for a fee that looked ambitious then and looks like theft now. Arsenal will have to be as serious about extending or defending that 2028 deal as they were about winning the league. What they will not have to do is fight a player straining for the exit. The evidence — his words, his contract, the way he played through niggles in May rather than protect himself for a summer showcase — points the other way.

France play Morocco in the quarter-final this weekend, and Saliba will mark whoever they put through the middle. My own rule, set in a stand in 1980 and never once repealed: check the cutting before you trust the feeling. The cutting, this time, says 2028.