“Not only are you bad, but you’re hurting me.” The words, there, or so it was claimed, of Lionel Messi; and however you spin it, a fairly tough six-month performance review from the greatest player of all time and your own footballing idol.
Back in February 2023 Vitinha was very quick to deny that any such training ground altercation had taken place between himself and Messi at PSG, whatever the reports in the French football press at the time (another version of that conversation has Messi saying: “Do you see? This is why you’re shit.”)
Vitinha was clear: never happened. All the same this shadow interaction was cast at the time as a glimpse of the wider unease among the aristos, the powdered wigs of that star-system dressingroom. Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappé were, it was said, “disappointed with the quality” of the club’s most recent recruits.
Given those new arrivals included Vitinha and Fabián Ruiz, two-thirds of the Champions League-winning midfield, that disappointment has now presumably been served up very, very cold at Sunday’s victory buffet in Munich.
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But whatever the extent of those tensions there is no doubt Vitinha was still idling on the runway at that point: 23 years old and still all promise, a mix of obvious weak spots – slow, physically slight – and obvious super-strengths, most notably the strangely intimate and tender relationship with the ball.
Fast forward to Saturday night and the evisceration of Inter Milan in Munich has confirmed his altered status. Vitinha is now the most effective central midfielder in the world, a Champions League-winning fulcrum and the key lubricant in Luis Enrique’s treble-winning team.
Everyone likes this kind of story, the late bloomer who offers an on-this-day angle at each fresh note of triumph. Let’s do it then. Four years ago Vitinha was coming on as a late sub for Wolves in a 1-0 defeat at Everton, his last loan appearance before Wolves passed up on a low-cost option to buy him.
The year before, he spent the fag-end of his first spell at Porto repeatedly coming on between the 72nd- and 77th-minute mark. Even his squad number was 77. He was basically that 77th-minute guy, generically high technique, an avatar of promising-Velcro-touch Portuguese midfielder.
Wolves had quite a few of these in their sights at the time. Who do you take the gamble on? Who can make the leap up here? For all the data, the smell test, the eye test, the gut test, nobody in football really knows about other elements like pressure points, will, chemistry, the ability to produce moments of clarity when the air is thinnest, as Vitinha did to make PSG’s first goal on Saturday night.
The key pass to Désiré Doué was clipped hard, raising the tempo perfectly, hitting just the right spot on Doué’s foot. It was a moment that will slip between the headline numbers, but which changed the game decisively.
For Vitinha there was an assist in the second half, a through pass to Doué, who ran on to make it 3-0 and chloroform Inter into a final state of submission.
It seemed fitting PSG’s deep conductor should assert himself in this way on this stage, if only because Vitinha has been utterly key to the more nuts-and-bolts transformation of the team.
First as an element of control in the classic modern style, brilliant at taking the ball and funnelling it on, a footballer who will simply wear you down and make you chase, killing you softly, flooding your calves with lactic acid.
Vitinha completed more passes than any other player in this season’s Champions League, and ended up second on kilometres covered, just behind his maniacal co-pivot João Neves. But this is not your basic ball-hog. Vitinha has something else, an ability to drive the game as well as control it, hot as well as cold possession. Against Inter his most telling stat was 44 of 46 medium-range passes completed, and it was notable how often that longer pass was the source of a shift of gear or a sudden transition.
It is a quality of command that didn’t seem to come easily. It is perhaps a little overlooked, but it takes an extraordinary degree of confidence, even a kind of arrogance to run a game like this, to be the passing fulcrum in a possession-heavy team. For Vitinha the point of ignition came after his return to Porto from Wolves. Manchester United, Arsenal and Barcelona were soon being posited as likely destinations, unsurprisingly given the GDP of Portugal is basically 35 per cent transfer rumours, 25 per cent hidden agents’ fees.
PSG, for whom no signing is ever really a gamble, were willing to pay the €41.5 million release clause. Still there was a sense of something slightly blocked in his progress. By the time of the ghost falling-out with Messi, L’Équipe was already putting Vitinha at the heart of internal disappointment around the 2022 rebuild.
A club insider was quoted as saying: “It’s the weakest since I’ve been at the club. They don’t understand why PSG let [Leandro] Paredes, Idrissa Gueye and even Julian Draxler go to recruit Vitinha, Fabián Ruiz and Carlos Soler, even if the latter is a little better regarded than the other two.” Even by debauchery-era PSG standards, always a farrago of leaks and bitchiness, it looks like a wonderful line now.
Luis Enrique deserves most credit for the way Vitinha has flowered, encouraging him to act as an autonomous passing unit, a roving brain. How far can this go? There is a sense with Vitinha in this PSG team of a cog hitting its mark, of the perfect part for a highly engineered team, like installing exactly the right replacement reverse flange-torque transponder in a luxury German saloon car.
Wolves may have failed to see the endgame with this slow-burn child of Xavi but it is also significant that English football still doesn’t produce this type of player, the pure passing technician. There is no doubt Vitinha, or even half a Vitinha, would have seriously upgraded any of the trophy-curious England teams of the last few years. As he has with Paris, who have a chance now to rule the world at the grisly but hugely lucrative Club World Cup. Who knows, along the way Vitinha 2.0 might even get a chance to make Messi look bad again. – Guardian
